THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL
The conversation with her old friend had upset Mrs. Ryan. These were
grievances she did not talk of to all the world, and the luxury of such
plain speaking was paid for by a re-awakened smart. The numb ache of a
sorrow was always with her, but her consciousness of it was dulled in
the diversion of every day’s occupations. Bringing it to the surface
this way gave it a new vitality, and when the conversation was over and
the visitor gone it refused to subside into its old place.
She went slowly up stairs, hearing the low murmur of voices from the
sitting-room where Cornelia and Jack Duffy were still secluded. Even
the thought of that satisfactorily-budding romance did not cheer her as
it had done earlier in the day. As she had told Cannon, she was not the
woman she had been. Old age was coming on her and with it a softening
of her iron nature. She wanted her son, her Benjamin, dearly beloved
with all the forces of her maturity as his father had been with all
the glow of her youth.
In her own room she threw aside the lace curtains, and looking out on
the splendor of the afternoon, determined to seek cheer in the open
air. Like all Californians she had a belief in the healing beneficence
of air and sunlight. As the sun had soothed Berny of her sense of care
so now it wooed her enemy also to seek solace in its balm. She rang for
the servant and ordered the carriage. A few minutes later, clad in rich
enshrouding black, a small and fashionable bonnet perched on her head,
she slowly made her way down stairs and out to the sidewalk where the
victoria, glittering in the trim perfection of its appointments and
drawn by a pair of well-matched chestnuts, stood at the curb.
The man on the box touched his hat with respectful greeting and the
Chinese butler, who had accompanied her down the steps, arranged the
rug over her knees and stepped back with the friendly “good-by,” which
is the politeness of his race. They respected, feared, and liked her.
Every domestic who had ever worked in Delia Ryan’s service from the
first “hired girl” of her early Shasta days to the staff that now
knew the rigors of her dominion, had found her a just and generous
if exacting mistress. She had never been unfair, she had never been
unkind. She was one of themselves and she knew how to manage them,
how to make them understand that she was master, and that no drones
were permitted in her hive; how to make them feel that she had a heart
that sympathized with them, not as creatures of an alien class remotely
removed from her own, but as fellow beings, having the same passions,
griefs and hopes as herself.
As the carriage rolled forward she settled back against the cushioned
seat and let her eyes roam over the prospect. It was the heart of the
afternoon, still untouched by chill, not a breath stirring. Passing up
the long drive which leads to the park, the dust raised by wheels hung
ruddy in the air. The long shadows of trees striped the roadway in an
irregular black pattern, picked out with spatterings of sunshine, like
a spilled, gold liquid. Belts of fragrance, the breaths of flowering
shrubs, extended from bushy coppices, and sometimes the keen, acrid
odor of the eucalyptus rose on the air. From this lane of entrance
the park spread fan-like into a still, gracious pleasance. The rich,
golden light slept on level stretches of turf and thick mound-shaped
groups of trees. The throb of music--the thin, ethereal music of
out-of-doors--swelled and sank; the voices of children rose clear and
fine from complicated distances, and once the raucous cry of a peacock
split the quietness, seeming to break through the pictorial serenity of
the lovely, dreamy scene.
Mrs. Ryan sat without movement, her face set in a sphinx-like
profundity of expression. People in passing carriages bowed to her but
she did not see them and their salutes went unreturned. Her vision was
bent back on scenes of her past, so far removed from what made up the
present, so different and remote from her life to-day, that it did not
seem as if the same perspective could include two such extremes. Even
her children were not links of connection between those old dead times
and now. They had been born when Con’s fortunes were in the ascendant.
They had known none of the privations of the brave days when she and
her man had faced life together, young, and loving, and full of hope.
The carriage ascended a slight rise, and the sea, a glittering plain,
lay in full view. It met the sky in a white dazzle of light. All its
expanse coruscated as if each wave was crested with tinsel, and where
they receded from the beach it was as though a web of white and shining
tissue was drawn back, torn and glistening, from the restraining clutch
of the sand. The smooth bareness of fawn-colored dunes swept back from
the shore. They rose and fell in undulations, describing outlines of a
suave, fluid grace, lovely as the forms of drifting snow, or the swell
of waves. Ocean and dunes, for all the splendor of sky and sun that
overarched and warmed them, suggested a gaunt, primeval desolation.
They had the loneliness of the naked earth and the unconquerable
sea--were a bit of the primordial world before man had tamed and
softened it.
Mrs. Ryan swept them with a narrow, inward gaze which saw neither,
but, in their place, the house in Virginia City, where she and Con
had lived when they were first married in the early sixties. It was
of “frame”--raw, yellow boards with narrow strips of wood nailed over
every seam to keep the wind out. There had been a rough porch on one
side where her wash-tub had stood. Out-of-doors there in the summer
weather she had bent over the wash-board most of the day. She had made
enough money to furnish the prospect hole that Con was working, with
tools and miner’s supplies. Little Dick was born there; he had died
afterward in Shasta. He used to lie in a wash-basket on the soiled
linen in the sun. He would have been forty-five now, sixteen years
older than Dominick.
She gave an order to the coachman who, drawing up, turned the horses,
and the carriage started on its return trip. The sun was behind it,
painting with level, orange rays the thick foliage of trees and the
backs of foot passengers. Whatever it touched had the appearance of
being overlaid with a gilded glaze through which its natural colors
shone, deepened and brilliant.
Mrs. Ryan’s memories had leaped from Virginia City to Shasta.
After Con’s prospect at Gold Hill had “petered” they had moved to
California, been members of that discouraged route which poured,
impoverished in pocket and enfeebled in health, from the wreck of the
gutted Nevada camp back to their own Golden State and its beguiling
promises. They had opened a grocery in Shasta in sixty-eight, first a
little place where Con and she waited behind the counter, then, when
they began to prosper, a big store on the corner. “Ryan’s” was written
over the entrance in the beginning, when they had no money to spend, in
black on a strip of canvas, after that in gold letters on a handsome
sign. She had kept the books there while Con had managed the business,
and they had done well. It was the beginning of their prosperity and
how they had worked for it! Night after night up till midnight and the
next morning awake before the birds. Two children had died there and
three had been born. It had been a full life, a splendid life, the best
a woman could know, working for her own, making them a place in the
world, fighting her way up, shoulder to shoulder with her man.
Money had been her goal. She had not wanted to hoard it; of itself it
meant nothing to her. She had wanted it for her children: to educate
them better than she had been educated, to give them the advantages
she had never known, to buy pleasures and position and consideration
for them. She had felt the insignificance of poverty, and she was
determined that they should never feel it. They should have the power
that it seemed to Delia Ryan money alone gave, the thing she had none
of, when, in her ragged girlhood, she winced and chafed under the
dominance of those she felt to be her inferiors. She was a materialist
by nature, and life had made her more of one. Money conquered, money
broke the trail that led everywhere, money paid the gate entrance to
all paradises. That was what she had always thought. And now when she
was close on seventy, and her strength to fight for the old standards
and ward off the creeping chill of age was weakened, she had come to
realize that perhaps it was not the world-ruling power she had thought
it. She had come to see it could turn upon one in strange ways. It
carried power and it carried a curse. Dominick, whose life it was to
have made brilliant, whose career it was to have crowned, Dominick had
lost all through it.
She was thinking this as the carriage swept into the wider reach of
the drive near the band stand. Though the music was still throbbing
on the air, people were already leaving. Broken lines were detaching
themselves from the seated mass in the chairs, disappearing among
the trees, and straggling out into the road. The wheels of the
victoria almost brushed the shoulders of a little party that moved
in irregular file between the grass edge and the drive. Mrs. Ryan let
her uninterested glance touch the hatted heads of the women and then
move forward to the man who headed the column. He held by the hand a
pretty, fair-haired child, who, leaning out from his restraining grasp,
walked a little before him, looking back laughingly into his face. Mrs.
Ryan’s eyes, alighting on his back, became suddenly charged with a
fierce fixity of attention. The carriage overhauled him and before he
looked up she leaned forward and saw his profile, the brow marked by a
frown, the child’s gay prattle causing no responsive smile to break the
brooding gravity that held his features.
As he felt the vibration of the wheel at his shoulder he started
aside and looked up. When he recognized his mother his face reddened,
and, with a quick smile, he lifted his hat. Her returning salute was
serious, almost tragically somber. Then the victoria swept on, and he
and the child, neither for a moment speaking, looked after the bonneted
head that soared away before them with a level, forward vibration, like
a floating bird, the little parasol held stiffly erect on its jointed
handle.
As Mrs. Ryan passed down the long park entrance she thought no more
of the past. The sight of her son, heading the file of his wife’s
relations, his face set in an expression of heavy dejection, scattered
her dreams of retrospect with a shattering impact. She had never seen
him look so frankly wretched; and to intensify the effect of his
wretchedness was the sprawling line of Iversons which surrounded him.
They seemed, to her furious indignation, like a guard cutting him off
from his kind, imprisoning him, keeping him for themselves. They were
publicly dragging him at their chariot wheels for all the world to see.
His wife instead of getting less was getting more power over him. She
had made him ask for the invitation to the ball and now she made him
escort herself and her sisters about on holidays.
The old woman’s face was dark with passion, her pale lips set into a
tight line. Money! Money might make trouble and bring disappointment,
but it would talk to those people. Money was all they were after. Well,
they could have it!
She let three days go by before she made the move she had determined
on ten minutes after she had passed Dominick. The Wednesday morning
following that Sunday--apparently a day of innocuous and simple
happenings, really so fraught with Fate--she put on her outdoor things
and, dispensing with the carriage, went down town on the car to see
Bill Cannon.
The Bonanza King’s office was on the first floor of a building owned
by himself on one of the finest Montgomery Street corners. It had been
built in the flush times of the Comstock and belonged to that epoch of
San Francisco architecture where long lines of windows were separated
by short columns and overarched by ornate embellishments in wood. As
Mrs. Ryan approached, the gold letters on these windows gleamed bravely
in the sun. They glittered even on the top-story casements, and her
eye, traveling over them, saw that they spelled names of worth, good
tenants who would add to the dignity and revenues of such an edifice.
She owned the corner opposite, and it gave her a pang of emulative envy
to notice how shabby her building looked, a relic of the sixties which
showed its antiquity in walls of brick, painted brown, and a restrained
meagerness of decoration in the matter of cornices. For some time she
had been thinking of tearing it down and raising a new, up-to-date
structure on the site. It would yield a fine interest on the investment
and be a good wedding jointure for Cornelia.
With her approach heralded by a rustling of rich stuffs and a subdued
panting, she entered the office. A long partition down one side of the
room shut off an inner sanctum of clerks. Through circular openings she
could see their faces, raised expectantly from ledgers as their ears
caught the frou-frou of skirts and a step, which, though heavy, was
undoubtedly feminine. She stopped at one of the circular openings where
the raised face looked older and graver than its fellows, and inquired
for Mr. Cannon, giving her name. In a moment the clerk was beside
her, knocking at a door which gave egress to still more sacred inner
precincts. Opening this, he bowed her into the dimly-lit solemnity
of the Bonanza King’s private office. Back in the outer room among
the clerks he relieved the strained curiosity of their faces with the
remark,
“Greek’s meeting Greek in there. It’s Mrs. Con Ryan.”
The private office looked out on an alley shut in a perpetual twilight
by the towering walls of surrounding buildings. The long windows that
ran from the floor to the ceiling could not let in enough light ever to
make it a bright room, and the something of dimness seemed appropriate
to the few massive pieces of furniture and the great safe in the
corner, with its lock glimmering from the dusk of continual shadow. Men
from windows across the alley could look into the office and see to
whom Bill Cannon was talking, and it was known that, for this reason,
he had another suite of rooms on one of the upper floors. But that that
most competent of business women, Con Ryan’s widow, should come to his
lair to parley with him was natural enough, and if the watchers across
the alley saw her it only added to their sober respect for the man who
was visited in his office by the richest woman in California.
She did not waste time beating about the bush. Sitting beside the desk,
facing the pale light from the long windows, she very quickly plunged
into the matter of her errand. It was a renewal of the conversation
of the previous Sunday. Cannon sat in his swivel chair, looking
meditatively at her. He had expected her, but not so soon, and as he
watched her his face showed a mild friendly surprise breaking through
its observant attention. It would have been difficult for any one,
even so astute a woman as Mrs. Ryan, to guess that her request for his
assistance in severing Dominick’s marriage bonds was affording the old
man the keenest gratification.
Their talk lasted nearly an hour. Before the interview ended they had
threshed out every aspect of the matter under discussion. There would
be no loose ends or slighted details in any piece of work which engaged
the attention of this bold and energetic pair of conspirators. The men
on the other side of the alley looked down on them, wondering what
business was afoot between Mrs. Con Ryan and Bill Cannon, that they
talked so long in the big dim office with its gloomy mahogany furniture
and the great black safe looming up in the corner.