THE LITTLE SPIDER
Berny had been turning over in her mind the advantages of accepting the
money--had been letting herself dwell upon the delights of possible
possession--when at the Sunday dinner that afternoon Josh McCrae threw
her back into the state of incensed rejection with which she had
met the first offer. With his face wreathed in joyous grins, he had
apprised her of the fact that only an hour earlier, while walking on
Telegraph Hill, he had seen Dominick there talking with Miss Cannon.
A good deal of query followed Josh’s statement. There was quite an
outburst of animated interrogations rising from the curiosity the
Iversons felt concerning Bill Cannon’s daughter, and under cover
of it Berny controlled her face and managed to throw in a question
or two on her own account. There had been a minute--that one when
Josh’s statement had struck with a shocking unexpectedness on her
consciousness--when she had felt and looked her wrath and amaze.
Then she had gripped her glass and drunk some water and, swallowing
gulpingly, had heard her sister’s rapid fire of questions, and Josh,
proud to have imparted such interesting information, answering
importantly. Putting down her glass, she said quite naturally,
“Where did you say you saw them--near the quarry?”
“Just by the edge, talking together. I was going to walk along and join
them, and then I thought they looked so sort of sociable, I’d better
not butt in. Dominick got to know her real well up in the Sierra,
didn’t he?”
“Yes, of course,” she said hurriedly. “They grew to be quite friends.
They must have met by accident on the hill. Dominick’s always walking
in those queer, deserted places.”
“You haven’t got acquainted with her yet, have you?” said the simple
Josh, whose touch was not of the lightest. “It would be a sort of grind
on the Ryans if you get really solid with her.”
“Oh, I can know her whenever I want,” Berny answered airily, above a
discomfort of growing revelation that was almost as sharp as a pain.
“Dominick’s several times asked me if I wanted to meet her, but it
always was at times when I’d other things to do. We’re going to ask her
to the flat to tea some time.”
On ordinary occasions, Berny would never have gone to this length of
romantic invention, for she was a judicious liar and believed, with
the sage, that a lie was too valuable a thing to waste. But just now
she was too upset, too preyed upon by shock and suspicion, to exercise
an artistic restraint, and she lied recklessly, unmindful of a future
when her listeners would expect to see her drafts on the bank of truth
cashed.
She was quiet for the rest of the afternoon, but it was not till she
had reached her own home, silent in its untenanted desertion, that she
had an opportunity to turn the full vigor of her mind on what she had
heard.
She had been jealous of Rose since that fatal Sunday when she had
discovered why Dominick was changed. It was not the jealousy of
disprized love, it was not the jealousy of thwarted passion. It
was a subtle compound of many ingredients, the main one a sense of
bursting indignation that two people--one of them a possession of
her own--should dare to seek for happiness where she had found only
dullness and disappointment. She had an enraging premonition that Rose
would probably succeed where she had failed. It made her not only
jealous of Rose, it made her hate her.
Josh’s words increased this, and caused her suspicions, which, if not
sleeping, had of late been dormant, to wake into excited activity.
Dominick’s lonely Sunday walks she now saw shared by the girl
who was trying to buy his freedom. Incidents that before she had
taken at their face value now were suddenly fraught with disturbing
significance. Why did Dominick go out so often in the evening? Since
the moonlight night, he had been out twice, once not coming back till
eleven. The confirmation of sight could hardly have made her more
confident that he must spend these stolen hours with Rose Cannon in
the palatial residence on Nob Hill. And it was not the most soothing
feature in the case that Berny should picture them in one of the
artistically-furnished parlors of which she had heard so much and seen
nothing but the linings of the window curtains. Here, amid glories of
upholstery, from the sight of which she was for ever debarred, Rose and
Dominick talked of the time when he should be free. Berny, like the
tiger lashing itself to fury with its own tail, thought of what they
said, till she became sure her imaginings were facts; and the more she
imagined, the more enraged and convinced she became.
She put from her mind all intention of ever taking the money. She
wanted it desperately, terribly; she wanted it so much that when she
thought of it it made her feel sick, but the joys of its possession
were at the unrealizable distance of dreams, while the fact of her
husband’s being enticed away by another woman was a thing of close,
immediate concern, a matter of the moment, as if some one were trying
to pick her pocket. As an appurtenance of hers, Dominick might not have
been a source of happiness, but that was no reason why he should be a
source of happiness to some one else.
Berny did not argue with any such compact clearness. She was less
lucid, less defined and formulated in her ideas and desires than she
had been when Bill Cannon made the first offer. Anger had thickened and
obscured her clarity of vision. Suspicions, harbored and stimulated
by a mind which wished for confirmation of the most extravagant, had
destroyed the firm and well-outlined conception of what she wanted and
was willing to fight for. In fact, she had passed the stage in the
controversy when she was formidable because she stood with the strength
of sincerity in her position, her demands, and refusals. Now the
integrity of her defiance was gone. She wanted the money. She wanted
to take it, and her refusal to do so was false to herself and to her
standards.
She knew that the interview for which Bill Cannon had asked was for a
last, deciding conversation. He was to make his final offer. It was a
moment of torture to her when she wondered what it would be, and her
mind hovered in distracted temptation over the certain two hundred
thousand dollars and the possible quarter of a million. It was then
that she whipped up her wrath, obscured for the moment by the mounting
dizziness of cupidity, and thought of Rose and Dominick in the Japanese
room, or the Turkish room, or the Persian room, into which she had
never been admitted. The thought that they were making love received a
last, corrosive bitterness from the fact that Berny could not see the
beautiful and expensive surroundings of these sentimental passages.
She was in this state of feverish distractedness when she went to
Bill Cannon’s office. She had chosen the last of the three days he
had specified in his note, and had left the flat at the time he had
mentioned as the latest hour at which he would be there. She had
chosen the last day as a manner of indicating her languid interest in
the matter to be discussed, and had also decided to be about fifteen
minutes late, as it looked more indifferent, less eager. Bill Cannon
would never know that she was dressed and ready half an hour before
she started, and had lounged about the flat, watching the clocks, and
starting at every unrecognized sound.
She was received with a flattering deference. As her footstep sounded
on the sill of the outer office, a face was advanced toward one of the
circular openings in the long partition, immediately disappeared, and
then a door was thrown back to admit to her presence a good-looking,
well-dressed young man. His manner was all deferential politeness.
A murmur of her name, just touched with the delicately-questioning
quality imparted by the faintest of rising inflections, accompanied
his welcoming bow. Mr. Cannon was expecting her in the private office.
Special instructions had been left that she should be at once admitted.
Would she be kind enough to step this way?
Berny followed him down the long strip of outer office where it flanked
the partition in which the regularly-recurring holes afforded glimpses
of smooth bent heads. She walked lightly, and had an alert, wary air
as though it might be a good thing to be prepared for an ambush. She
had been rehearsing her part of the interview for days; and like
other artists, now that the moment of her appearance was at hand,
felt extremely nervous, and had a sense of girding herself up against
unforeseen movements on the part of the foe.
Nothing, however, could have been more disarmingly friendly than the
old man’s greeting. As the door opened and the clerk pronounced her
name, he rose from his seat and welcomed her in a manner which was a
subtle compound of simple cordiality and a sort of masonic, unexpressed
understanding, as between two comrades bound together by a common
interest. Sitting opposite him in one of the big leather chairs, she
could not but feel some of her resentment melting away, and her
stiffly-antagonistic pose losing something of its rigidity as he smiled
indulgently on her, asking about herself, about Dominick, finally about
her sisters, with whose names and positions he appeared flatteringly
familiar.
Berny answered him cautiously. She made a grip at her receding anger,
conscious that she needed all her sense of wrong to hold her own
against this crafty enemy. Even when he told her he had heard with
admiration and wonder of Hannah’s fine record in the primary school
department, her smile was guarded, her answer one of brief and watchful
reserve. She wished he would get to the point of the interview. Her
mind could not comfortably contain two subjects at once, and it was
crammed and running over with the all-important one of the money. Her
eyes, fixed on him, did not stray to the furnishings of the room or the
long windows that reached to the ceiling and through the dimmed panes
of which men on the other side of the alley stood looking curiously
down on her.
“Well,” he said, when he had disposed of Hannah’s worthiness and even
celebrated the merits of Josh in a sentence of appreciation, “it’s
something to have such a good sterling set of relations. They’re
what make the ‘good families’ in our new West out here. And they’re
beginning to understand that in Europe. When they see your people in
Paris, they’ll recognize them as the right kind of Americans. The
French ain’t as effete as you’d think from what you hear. They know
the real from the imitation every time. They’ve had their fill of Coal
Oil Johnnys and spectacular spenders. What they’re looking for is the
strong man and woman who have carved out their own path.”
Berny’s eyes snapped into an even closer concentration of attention.
“Maybe that’s so,” she said, “but I don’t see when my sisters are ever
going to get to Paris.”
“They’ll go over to see you,” he answered. “I guess I could manage now
and then to get ’em passes across the continent.”
He rested one elbow on the desk against which he was sitting, and with
his hand caressing his short, stubby beard, he looked at Berny with
eyes of twinkling good nature.
“Come to think of it,” he added, “I guess I could manage the
transportation across the ocean, too. It oughtn’t to cost ’em, all
told, more’n fifty dollars. It seems hard luck that Miss Hannah, after
a lifetime of work, shouldn’t see Paris, and----”
“What makes you think I’m going to be there?” said Berny sharply. She
found any deviation from the subject in hand extremely irritating, and
her manner and voice showed it.
“Oh, of course you are,” he said, with a little impatient, deprecating
jerk of his head. “You can’t be going to persist in a policy that’s
simply cutting your own throat.”
“I rather fancy I am,” she answered in a cool, hard tone. To lend
emphasis to her words, she unbent from her upright attitude and leaned
against the chair-back in a sudden assumption of indifference. Her
eyes, meeting his, were full of languid insolence.
“I don’t feel that I’ll go to Paris at all,” she said. “I think little
old San Francisco’s good enough for me.”
He looked away from her at the papers on the desk, eyed them for a
thoughtful moment, and then said,
“I didn’t think you were as short-sighted as that. I’ll tell you fair
and square that up to this I’ve thought you were a pretty smart woman.”
“Well, I guess from this on, you’ll have to put me down a fool.”
She laughed, a short, sardonic laugh, and her adversary smiled politely
in somewhat absent response. With his eyes still on the papers, he said,
“No, no--I can’t agree to that. Short-sighted is the word. You’re not
looking into the future, you’re not calculating on your own powers of
endurance. How much longer do you think you can stand this battle with
your husband and the Ryans?”
In the dead watches of the night, Berny had asked herself this
question, and found no answer to it. She tried to laugh again, but it
was harder and less mirthful than before.
The old man leaned forward, shaking an admonitory forefinger at her.
“Don’t you know, young woman, that’s a pretty wearing situation?
Don’t you know to live in a state of perpetual strife will break down
the strongest spirit? The dropping of water will wear away a stone.
You _can’t_ stand the state of siege and warfare you’ve got yourself
into much longer. Your rage is carrying you along now. You’re mad as
a whole hive full of hornets and the heat of it’s keeping you going,
furnishing fuel to the engines, so to speak. But you can’t keep up such
a clip. You’ll break to pieces and you’ll break suddenly. Then what’ll
happen? Why, the Ryans’ll come with a big broom and sweep the pieces
out. They won’t leave one little scrap behind. That flat on Sacramento
Street will be swept as clean of you as if you’d never had your dresses
hanging in the cupboard or your toothbrush on the wash-stand. Old
Delia’s a great housekeeper. When she gets going with a broom there’s
not a speck escapes her.”
His narrowed eyes looked into hers with that boring steadiness that
she was beginning to know. He was not smiling now, rather he looked a
man who knew he was talking of very momentous things and wanted his
companion to know it too.
“That’s all talk,” Berny snapped. “If that’s all you’ve got to say to
me, I’d better be going.”
“No, no,” he stretched out an opened hand and with it made a
down-pressing gesture that was full of command. “Don’t move yet. These
are just suggestions of mine, suggestions I was making for your good.
Of course, if you don’t care to follow them, it’s your affair, not
mine. I’ve done my duty, and, after all, that’s what concerns me most.
What I asked you to come here for to-day was to talk about this matter,
to talk further, to thresh it out some more. I’ve seen Mrs. Ryan since
our last meeting.”
He paused, and Berny sat upright, her eyes on him in a fixity of
listening that was almost a glare. She was tremulously anxious and yet
afraid to hear the coming words.
“What did she say?” she asked with the same irritation she had shown
before.
“She doubles her offer to you. She’ll give you two hundred thousand
dollars to leave her son.”
“Well, I won’t,” said Berny, drawing herself to the edge of the chair.
“She can keep her two hundred thousand dollars.”
“That two hundred thousand dollars, well invested, would give an income
of from twelve to fifteen thousand a year. On that, in Paris, you’d be
a rich woman.”
“I guess I’ll stay a poor one in San Francisco.”
He eyed her ponderingly over the hand that stroked his beard.
“I wonder,” he said slowly, “what’s making you act like this? You stump
me. Here you are, poor, treated like dirt, ostracized as if you were a
leper, with the most powerful family in California your open enemy, and
you won’t take a fortune that’s offered you without a condition, and go
to a place where you’d be honored and courted and could make yourself
anything you’d like. I can’t make it out. You beat me.”
Berny was flattered. Even through the almost sickening sense of longing
that the thought of the lost two hundred thousand dollars created in
her, she was conscious of the gratified conceit of the woman who is
successfully mysterious.
“Don’t bother your head about it,” she said as lightly as she could.
“Think I’m crazy, if that makes it any easier for you.”
“I can’t think _that_,” he answered, conveying in the accented
monosyllable his inability to think lightly of her mental equipment.
“There’s something underneath it all I don’t know. You’ve not been
quite open, quite as open as I think _my_ frankness deserves. But, of
course, a man can’t force a lady’s confidence. If you don’t want to
give me yours, I’ve got to be content without it.”
Berny emitted a vague sound of agreement. She once more drew herself to
the edge of the chair, taking the renewed, arranging grip of departure
on her purse. She wanted to go.
“Well,” she said with the cheerful lengthening of the word, which is
the precursor of the preliminary sentence of farewell, “I guess----”
but he stopped her again with the outspread, authoritative hand.
“Don’t be in such a hurry; I’ve not finished yet. There’s more to be
said, and it’s worth losing a few moments over.” His face was so much
more commanding than his words that she made no attempt to move, though
each minute deepened her desire to leave.
“This is just between you and me,” he went on slowly, his voice
lowered, dropped to the key of confidences. “It’s a little matter
between us that no one else needs to know anything about. My part of
it just comes from the fact that I want to do a good turn not only to
Delia Ryan, but to you. I’m sorry for you, young woman, and I think
you’re up against it. Now, here’s my proposition; I’ll add something
to that money myself. I’ll give you another hundred thousand. I’ll put
it with Mrs. Ryan’s pile, and it’ll run your fortune up well past a
quarter of a million.”
His eyes fixed upon her were hard in his benevolently-smiling face.
“What do you think about it?” he asked, as she was speechless. “Three
hundred thousand dollars in a lump’s a goodish bit of money.”
Berny felt dizzy. As her rancor had seemed slipping from her in the
earlier part of the interview, now she felt as if her resolution was
suddenly melting. She was confused between the strangling up-rush of
greed and the passion that once again rose in her against the old man,
who showed such a bold determination to sweep her from his daughter’s
path. She was no longer mistress of herself. Inward excitement, the
unfamiliar struggle with temptation, had upset and unnerved her. But
she did not yet know it, and she answered slowly, with a sort of
sullenness, that might have passed as the heaviness of indifference.
“What do you want to give it to me for?”
“Because I’m sorry for you. Because I want you to get out of this hole
you’re in, and go and make something of your life.”
Before she knew it, Berny said low, but with a biting incisiveness,
“Oh, you liar!”
Cannon was surprised. He looked for a staring moment at her pale face,
stiff over its strained muscles, and said in a tone of cheerful amaze,
“Now, what do you mean by that?”
“Just what I say,” she said. “You’re a liar and you know it. Every word
you’ve said to me’s been a lie. Why, Mrs. Ryan’s better than you. She
don’t come covering me with oily stories about wanting me to be happy.
You think that I don’t know why you’re offering me this money. Well,
old man, I do. You want to get my husband for your own daughter, Rose
Cannon.”
It was Cannon’s turn to be speechless. He had not for years received so
unexpected and violent a blow. He sat in the same attitude, not moving
or uttering a sound, and looking at Berny with a pair of eyes that each
second grew colder and more steely. Berny, drawn to the edge of her
chair, leaned toward him, speaking with the stinging quickness of an
angry wasp.
“You thought I didn’t know it. Well, I do. I know the whole thing. I’ve
just sat back and watched you two old thieves thinking everything was
hidden, like a pair of ostriches. And you being so free with your glad
hand and being sorry for me and wanting me to make the most of my life!
You said I was a smart woman. Well, I’m evidently a lot smarter than
you thought I was.”
“So it seems,” he said. “Smart enough to do some very neat inventing.”
“Inventing!” she cried, “I wish there was some inventing about it. _I_
don’t take any pleasure in thinking that another woman’s trying to buy
my husband.”
He dropped his hand from his chin, and moved a little impatiently in
his chair.
“Come,” he said with sudden authority, “I can’t waste my time this
way. Are you going to take the money or not?”
His manner, as if by magic, had changed. Every suggestion of deference,
or consideration had gone from it. The respect, with which he had been
careful to treat her, had suddenly vanished; there was something subtly
brutal in his tone, in the very movement of impatience he made. It was
as if the real man were at last showing himself.
She uttered a furious phrase of denial and sprang to her feet. His
manner was the last unbearable touch on the sore helplessness of her
futile rage. His chair had been standing sidewise toward the desk, and
now, with a jerk of his body, he swept it back into position.
“All right, then go!” he said, without looking at her.
Berny had intended going, rushing out of the place. Now at these words
of dismissal, flung at her as a bone to a dog, she suddenly was rooted
to the spot. All her reason, balance, and common sense were swept away
in the flood of her quivering, blind anger.
“I will _not_ go,” she cried, at the pitch of folly, “I will _not_ till
I’m good and ready. Who are you to order me out? Who are you to tell
me what I’m to do? A man who tries to buy another woman’s husband for
his daughter, and then pretends he and she are such a sweet, innocent
pair! Wouldn’t people be surprised if they knew that Miss Rose Cannon
wanted my husband, was getting her father to make bids for him, and was
meeting him every Sunday!”
“Stop!” thundered the old man, bringing his open hand down on the table
with a bang.
The tone of his voice was bull-like, and the blow of his hand so
violent that the fittings of the heavy desk rattled. Berny, though not
frightened, was startled and drew back. For a moment she thought he
was going to rise and forcibly put her out. Then she looked sidewise
and saw two men at a window on the other side of the alley gazing
interestedly down at them. Cannon was conscious of the observers at the
same time. He restrained the impulse to spring to his feet which had
made her shrink, and rose slowly.
“Look here,” he said quietly, “you don’t seem to understand that this
interview’s at an end.”
“No,” she said with a stubborn shake of her head, “I’m not through yet.”
“There’s nothing more for you to say unless you want to accept Mrs.
Ryan’s offer.”
“Yes, there is, there’s lots more for me to say, but since you seem in
such a hurry to get rid of me, I’ll have to wait and say it to your
daughter next time I see her.”
She paused, daring and impudently bold. She was a woman of remarkable
physical courage, and the old man’s aspect, which might have affrighted
a less audacious spirit, had no terrors for her. He stood by the desk,
his hands on his hips, the fingers turned toward his back, and his
face, the chin drawn in, fronting her with a glowering fixity of menace.
“When do _you_ ever see my daughter?” he asked, the accented pronoun
pregnant with scorn.
“Oh, on the streets, in the stores, walking round town. I often meet
her. I’ve wanted several times lately to stop and tell her what I think
of the way she’s acting. She doesn’t think that I know all about what
she’s doing. She’ll be surprised when she hears that I do and what _I_
think about it.”
She faced the old man’s motionless visage with an almost debonair
audacity.
“You can offer me money,” she said, “but you can’t muzzle me.”
Cannon, without changing his attitude, replied,
“I can do a good many things you don’t think of. Take my advice, young
woman, and muzzle yourself. Don’t leave it for me to do. I’ve had
nothing but friendly feelings for you up to this, and I’d hate to have
you see what a damned ugly enemy I can be.”
He gave his head a nod, dropped his hands and turned from her. As he
moved, a small spider that had been hidden among the papers on the
desk started to scuttle over the yellow blotting pad. It caught his eye.
“Look there,” he said, indicating it, “that little spider thinks it can
have things all its own way on my desk. But--” and he laid his great
thumb on it, crushing it to a black smudge--“that’s what happens to it.
Now, Mrs. Dominick Ryan, that’s not the first little spider that’s come
to grief trying to run amuck through my affairs. And it don’t seem, as
things look now, as if it was going to be the last. It’s not a healthy
thing for little spiders to think they can run Bill Cannon.”
He rubbed his soiled thumb on the edge of the blotter, and Berny looked
at the stain that had been the spider.
“Best not butt into places where little spiders are not wanted,” he
said, and then looking at her sidewise, “Well, is it good-by?”
Something in the complete obliteration of the adventurous insect--or
the words that had accompanied its execution--chilled Berny. She
was not frightened, nor less determined, but the first ardor of her
defiance was as though a cold breath had blown on it. Still she did not
intend to leave, ignominiously withdrawing before defeat. She wanted to
say more, rub it in that she knew the reason for his action, and let
him see still plainer in how slight esteem she held his daughter. But
the interlude of the spider had been such a check that she did not know
exactly how to begin again. She stood for a moment uncertain, and he
said,
“Will you take the money?”
“No!” she said loudly. “Don’t ask me that again!”
“All right,” he answered quietly, “that ends our business. Do you know
your way out, or shall I ring for Granger to see you to the door?”
There was a bell on the desk and he extended his hand toward it. She
guessed that Granger was the polished and deferential young man who had
greeted her on her entrance, and the ignominy of being escorted out
under a cloud--literally shown the door by the same youth, probably no
longer polished or deferential, was more than she could bear.
“I’m going,” she said fiercely. “Don’t dare to touch that bell! But
just be sure of one thing, Bill Cannon, this is not the last you or
your daughter will hear of me.”
He bowed with an air of irony that was so slight it might not have been
noticed.
“Any messages from you will be received by me with pleasure. But when
it comes to other things”--her hand was on the door-knob but she had to
listen--“remember the little spider.”
“Rats!” she said furiously, and tore open the door.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Ryan,” he cried. “Good afternoon!”
She did not answer, but even in her excitement was conscious that the
clerks behind the partition might be listening, and so shut the door,
not with the bang her state of mind made natural, but with a soft,
ladylike gentleness. Then she walked, with a tapping of little heels
and a rustle of silken linings, down the long, narrow office and out
into the street.