THE WALL ACROSS THE WAY
It was dark when Rose reached home. She had walked rapidly,
mechanically taking familiar turns, cresting the long slope of the hill
at a panting speed, rounding corners where gushes of light revealed her
as a dark, flitting figure hurrying by almost at a run.
She was as oblivious to her surroundings as Berny, left motionless on
the park bench. Never before in her life had anything like this touched
her. Such few troubles as she had known had been those of a sheltered
domestic life--the life of a cherished child whose dainty self-respect
had never been blurred by a coarse breath. Now had come this horrible
revelation. It shook the pretty world she had lived in like an
earthquake. Idols lay broken in the dust. She had often seen her father
rough and brutal as he was to Gene, but that was a different thing to
her father’s buying that wretched woman’s husband, buying him for her.
Berny’s face rose upon the darkness with its pitiful assumption of
jaunty bravado, its mean shrewishness under the coating of powder and
rouge.
“How could they do it?” the girl panted to herself. “How could they
ever do such a thing?”
She did not suspect Dominick. She could not have believed he was party
to such an action unless he had told her so with his own lips. As she
hurried on the thought that this was the woman he had bound himself to
for the rest of his life mingled with the other more poignantly-hateful
thoughts, with a last sickening sense of wretchedness. The sudden,
aghast consciousness of chaos, of an abrupt demolishing of the
pleasant, familiar settings of a life that never comes to some, came to
Rose that evening as she ran home through the fog.
She entered the house noiselessly and sped up to her room. It was time
to dress for dinner, and an old woman-servant who had once been her
nurse was waiting to help her. The mistress and maid were on terms of
affectionate intimacy and the progress of the toilet was generally
enlivened by gossip and laughter. To-night the girl was singularly
silent, responding with monosyllables and sometimes not at all to
the remarks of her assistant. As the woman drew the fastenings of
the dress together, she could feel that the body the gown clipped so
closely quivered, like the casing of machinery, vibrating to powerful
concussions within.
The silence that continued to hold her throughout dinner passed
unnoticed, as Gene was there and enlivened the passage of the meal by
contributing an almost unbroken stream of talk. The night before he had
been to a play, the plot of which, and its development in four acts, he
now related with a fullness of detail which testified to the closeness
of his attention and the accuracy of his memory. As each course was
removed from the table, and the young man could once more give his
undivided attention to the matter of discourse, he leaned back in his
chair and took up the dropped thread with a fresh zest and some such
remarks as:
“In the beginning of the next act, the hero comes in with his hat on,
and first he says”--and so on.
With each of these renewals of the narrative the Bonanza King subsided
against his chair-back in a limp attitude, staring with gloomy fixity
at his boy, and expelling his breath in a long audible rush of air,
which was sometimes a sigh and sometimes approached the proportions of
a groan.
At the end of dinner, when Gene announced his intention of leaving as
he was to attend a vaudeville performance, the old man began to show
signs of reviving animation, going so far as politely to ask his son
where he was going and with whom. His manner was marked by a warm,
hearty encouragement, as he said,
“Get the whole vaudeville program down by heart, Gene, and you can tell
it to us to-morrow night. There’ll be about twelve parts to it, and
Rose can order two extra courses for dinner, and we might hire some men
with stringed instruments for an accompaniment.”
Gene, with innocent good-humor, responded gaily.
“All right, father, I’ll give it my best attention, and if there’s
anything especially good, I’ll report to you. You and Rose might like
to go some night.”
His father, disappointed that his shaft had made no impression upon the
young man’s invulnerable amiability, emitted a scornful snort, and made
no further response to Gene’s cheery “Good night.”
“There,” he said, in tones expressing his relief, as the portière
dropped behind his son’s departing figure, “he’s gone! Now, Rosey, you
and I can have a talk.”
“Yes,” said his daughter, looking at her coffee-cup, “that’s what I
wanted. I want to have a long talk with you to-night, papa.”
“Fire away,” said the old man. “I’ve had to listen to that fool for an
hour, and it’s broken my spirit. You can say anything you like.”
“Not here,” said his daughter; “in the sitting-room. I’ll go in there
and wait for you.”
“Why not here? What’s the matter with here? I like it better than the
sitting-room. I’m more comfortable.”
“No, the servants will want to clear the things away, and I don’t want
them to hear what I say.”
“Tell the servants to go to hell,” said the old man, who, relieved by
Gene’s departure, was becoming more cheerful.
“No, this is something--something serious. I’ll go into the
sitting-room and wait for you. When you’ve finished your coffee, come
in.”
She rose from her chair and walked to the door. He noticed that she was
unusually unsmiling and it occurred to him that she had been so all
through dinner.
“What is it, honey,” he said, extending his hand toward her, “short on
your allowance?”
“Oh, no, it’s just--just something,” she said, lifting the portière.
“Come when you’re ready, I’ll be there.”
She walked up the hall to the sitting-room and there sat down in a low
chair before the chimneypiece. The chill of the fog had penetrated
the house and a fire had been kindled in the grate. On its quivering
fluctuation of flame she fixed her eyes. With her hands pressed between
her knees she sat immovable, thinking of what she was going to say, and
so nervous that the blood sang in her ears and the palms of her hands,
clasped tight together, were damp. She had never in her life shrunk so
before an allotted task. It sickened her and she was determined to
do it, to thresh it out to the end. When she heard her father’s step
in the passage her heart began to beat like a woman’s waiting for her
lover. She straightened herself and drew an inspiration from the bottom
of her lungs to try to give herself breath wherewith to speak.
The old man flung himself into an arm-chair at one side of the
fireplace, jerked a small table to his elbow, reached creakingly for an
ash tray, and, having made himself comfortable, took his cigar from his
mouth and said,
“Well, let’s hear about this serious matter that’s making you look like
a tragedy queen.”
“It _is_ serious,” she said slowly. “It’s something that you won’t like
to hear about.”
“Hit me with it,” he said, wondering a little what it could be. “Gene’s
gone and a child could eat out of my hand now.”
Looking into the fire, Rose said,
“I was out walking this afternoon and down in the Union Street plaza
a woman stopped me. I’d never seen her before. She was Mrs. Dominick
Ryan.”
The old man’s face became a study. A certain whimsical tenderness that
was generally in it when he spoke to his daughter vanished as if by
magic. It was as if a light had gone out. He continued to look at her
with something of blankness in his countenance, as if, for the first
moment of shock, every faculty was held in suspense, waiting for the
next words. He held his cigar, nipped between a pair of stumpy fingers,
out away from him over the arm of the chair.
“Well,” he said quietly, “and what had she to say to you?”
“The most disagreeable things I think any one ever said to me in my
life. If they’re true, they’re just too dreadful----” she stopped,
balking from the final disclosure.
“Suppose you tell me what they were?” he said with the same almost
hushed quietness.
“She said that you and Mrs. Ryan were offering her money--a good
deal of money, three hundred thousand dollars was the amount, I
think--to leave her husband so that he could get a divorce from her,
and then--” she swallowed as if to swallow down this last unbearable
indignity,--“and then be free to marry me.”
So Berny had told all. If deep, unspoken curses could have killed her,
she would have died that moment.
“Is it true?” Rose asked.
“Well, yes,” said the old man in a perfectly natural tone of dubious
consideration, “it’s a fairly accurate statement.”
“Oh, papa,” cried his daughter, “how could you have done it? How could
you have done such a thing? Such a hateful, horrible thing.”
“Horrible thing?” he repeated with an air of almost naïve astonishment.
“What’s horrible about it?”
“You know. I don’t have to tell you; you know. Don’t say to me that you
don’t think it’s horrible. Don’t make me feel as if we were suddenly
thousands of miles apart.”
The Bonanza King knew that in many matters, in most matters involving
questions of ethics, they were more thousands of miles apart than she
even now suspected. That was one of the reasons why he would have liked
to kill Berny, who, for the first time, had brought this dissimilarity
in their points of view to his daughter’s unwilling consideration. He
spoke slowly and vaguely to gain time. He knew it was a critical moment
in the relations between himself and the one creature in the world he
loved.
“I don’t want you to feel that way, dearie,” he said easily. “Maybe
there are things in this matter you don’t know about or understand.
And, anyway, what’s there so horrible in trying to separate a man and
woman who are unhappily married and can’t bear the sight of each other?”
“You were separating them for me,” she said in a low voice.
“Well, now,” he answered with a slight rocking movement of his
shoulders and a manner of almost bluff deprecation, “I can say that I
wasn’t, but suppose I was?”
She paid no attention to the last part of the sentence, and replied,
“The woman said you were.”
He did not answer for a minute, the truth being that he did not know
what it was best to say, and wanted to wait and let her make statements
that he could either contradict or seek to justify.
“What made you think I wanted to marry Dominick Ryan?” she said slowly,
her eyes on the fire.
This was a question that went to the core of the subject. He knew
now that he could not put her off, or slip from the responsibilities
of the occasion. Drawing himself to the edge of his chair, he leaned
forward and spoke with a sincerity and feeling that made his words very
impressive.
“One evening when I was at Antelope, I came into the sitting-room and
saw my daughter in the arms of Dominick Ryan. I knew that my girl
wasn’t the woman to let a man do that unless she loved him. That was
how I came to know.”
“Oh,” said Rose in a faint tone.
“Afterward I heard from Dominick of what his marriage was. I heard from
his mother, too. Then I saw his wife and I got a better idea from her
what it was than I did from either of the others. That fellow, the man
my daughter cared for, was tied up in a marriage that was hell. He was
bound to a woman who could only be managed with a club, and Dominick
was not the kind that uses a club to a woman. What liking he’d had for
her was gone. She stuck to him like a barnacle because she wanted to
get money, was ready to hang on, feet and hands, till Delia Ryan was
dead and then put up a claim for a share of the estate. Do you think a
man’s doing such a horrible thing to break up a marriage like that?”
“Yes,” said Rose, “I do. It was a marriage. They’d taken each other
for better or for worse. They’d made the most solemn promises to each
other. Neither you nor any one else had a right to interfere.”
She spoke with a hard determination, with something of an inflexible,
unrelenting positiveness, that was very unusual in her, which surprised
and, for the moment, silenced her father. It rose from a source of
conviction deeper than the surface emotions of likes and dislikes, of
loves and hates, of personal satisfactions and disappointments. At the
core of her being, with roots extending through all the ramifications
of her mental and moral nature, was a belief in the inviolability of
the marriage tie. It was a conviction founded on neither tradition,
nor reason, nor expediency, a thing of impulse, of sex, an hereditary
instinct inherited from generations of virtuous women, who, in the
days of their defenselessness, as in the days of their supremacy,
knew that the most sacred possessions of their lives--their husbands,
their children, their homes--rested on its stability. All the small,
individual preoccupations of her love for Dominick, her pity for his
sufferings, were swept aside by this greater feeling that she did not
understand or reason about. She obeyed an instinct, elemental as the
instinct of motherhood, when she refused to admit his right to break
the bond he had contracted.
Her father stared at her for the moment, chilled by a sense of
unfamiliarity in her sudden assumption of an attitude of challenge
and authority. He had often heard her inveigh against the divorces so
lightly obtained in the world about them. He had thought it one of
those pretty ornamental prejudices of hers, that so gracefully adorned
her youth and that he liked her to have when they did not interfere
with anything of importance. Now, set up like a barrier in the path, he
stopped before this one particular prejudice, perplexed at its sudden
intrusion, unwilling to believe that it was not a frail, temporary
obstruction to be put gently aside.
“Now listen, honey,” said he persuasively, “that’s all very well. I’ve
got no right to interfere, and neither, we’ll admit, has anybody.
But sometimes you have to push away these little rights and polite
customs. They’re very nice for every-day use, but they’re not for big
occasions. I suppose the Good Samaritan didn’t really have any right
to stop and bind up the wounds of the man he found by the wayside. But
I guess the feller he bound up was almighty glad that the Samaritan
didn’t have such a respect for etiquette and wait till he’d found
somebody to introduce them.”
“Oh, papa, that was different. Don’t confuse me and make me seem
a fool. I can’t talk like you. I can’t express it all clearly and
shortly. I only know it’s wrong; it’s a sin. I wouldn’t marry Dominick
Ryan if he was divorced that way if it killed me to give him up.”
“So if the woman voluntarily took the money and went away and got
Dominick to grant her the divorce, Dominick being, as we know, a man of
good record and spotless honor, you’d refuse to marry him?”
“I would, certainly I would. It would be perfectly impossible for me to
marry him under those circumstances. I should consider I was committing
a sin, a particularly horrible and unforgivable sin.”
“See here now, Rosey, just listen to me for a minute. Do you know what
Dominick Ryan’s marriage is? I don’t suppose you do. But you do know
that he married his mistress, a woman who lived with him eight months
before he made her his wife. She wasn’t an innocent young girl by any
means. She knew all right where she was going. She established that
relation with him with the intention of marrying him. She’s a darned
smart woman, and a darned unscrupulous one. That’s not the kind of
woman a man feels any particular respect for, or that a girl like you’d
give a lot of sympathy to, is it?”
“I don’t see that that would make any difference,” she said. “I’m not
thinking of her character, I’m thinking of her rights.”
“And don’t her character and her rights sort of dovetail into each
other?”
“No, I don’t see that they do. The law’s above the character or the
person. It’s the law, without any question of the man or the woman.”
“Oh Rosey, dear, you’re talking like a book, not like a girl who’s got
to live in a world with ordinary people in modern times. This woman,
that you’re arguing about as if she was the mother of the Gracchi,
hasn’t got any more morality or principle than you could put on the
point of a pin.”
“She’s been quite good and proper since her marriage.”
“Well, now, let’s leave her and look at Dominick’s side. He marries her
honorably and lives with her for nearly three years. Every semblance
of affection that he had for her gets rubbed off in those three years,
every illusion goes. He’s tied to a woman that he can’t stand. He went
up to Antelope that time because they’d had some sort of a scrap and
he felt he couldn’t breathe in the same house with her. He told me
himself that they’d not lived as man and wife for nearly a year. Now, I
don’t know what you’re going to say, but _I_ think to keep on living in
_that_ state is all wrong. I’ll borrow your expression, I think it’s a
sin.”
She answered doggedly:
“It’s awful, but she’s his wife. Oh, if you’d seen her face when she
talked to me, her thin, mean, common face, all painted and powdered and
so miserable!”
He thought she was wavering, that he saw in this unreasonable,
illogical dodging of the point at issue a sign of defeat, and he pushed
his advantage.
“And you--a girl of heart and feeling like you--would condemn that man
and woman to go on living that lie, that useless, purposeless lie? I
can’t understand it. What good comes of it? What’s the necessity for
it? Do you realize what a man Dominick might be if he was married to
the right woman, and had a decent home where he could live like a
Christian? Why, he’d be a different creature. He’d have a future. He’d
make his place in the community. All the world would be before him, and
he’d mount up to where he belongs. And what is he now? Nothing. All the
best in him’s paralyzed by this hell of a box he’s got himself into.
The man’s just withering up with despair.”
It was almost too much. For a moment she did not answer, then said in a
small voice like a child’s,
“You’re making this very hard for me, papa.”
“My God, Rosey!” he cried, exasperated, “you’re making it hard for
yourself. It’s you with your cast-iron prejudices, and your obstinacy,
who are making it hard.”
“Well, I’ve got them,” she said, rising to her feet. “I’ve got them,
and they’ll stay with me till I die. Nothing’s going to change me in
this. I can’t argue and reason about them. They’re part of me.”
She approached the mantelpiece, and, leaning a hand on it, looked down
at the fire. The light gilded the front of her dress and played on her
face, down-drooped and full of stern decision.
“It’s quite true,” she said slowly, “that I love Dominick. I love him
with the best I’ve got. It’s true that I would like to be his wife. It
would be a wonderful happiness. But I can’t have it, and so there’s no
good thinking about it, or trying to bring it about. It can’t be, and
we--you too, papa--must give it up.”
He pressed himself back in his chair, looking at her with lowering,
somber disapprobation--a look he had seldom had cause to level at his
daughter.
“So you’re going to condemn this poor devil, who loves you and whom you
say you love, to a future that’s going to kill any hope in him? You’re
going to say to him, ‘You can be free, and make something of your life,
and have the woman you want for your wife, but _I_ forbid all that, and
I’m going to send you back to prison.’ I can’t seem to believe that
it’s my Rosey who’s saying that, and who’s so hard and inhuman.”
Rose turned from the fire. He noted an expression almost of austerity
on her face that was as new to him as the revelation of obstinacy and
indifference to his will she had shown to-night.
“Papa, you don’t understand what I feel. It’s not what you want, or
what I want, or what Dominick wants. It’s not what’s going to please
us and make us comfortable and happy. It’s something that’s much more
important than that. I can’t make Dominick happy and let him make his
life a success at the expense of that woman. I can’t take him out
of prison, as you call it, because he’s got a responsibility in the
prison, that he voluntarily took on himself, and that he’s got to stand
by. A man can’t stay by his marriage only as long as it’s pleasant. He
can’t throw down the woman he’s made his wife just because he finds he
doesn’t like her. If she’s been disagreeable that’s a misfortune, but
it doesn’t liberate him from the promises he’s made.”
“Then you think when a man like Dominick Ryan, hardly more than a boy,
makes a mistake that ruins his life, he’s got to stay by it?”
“Yes, he must. He’s given a solemn promise. He must keep it. Mistake or
sin doesn’t matter.”
The old man was silent. He had presented his case as strongly and
persuasively as he knew how, and he had lost it. There was no longer
any use in arguing with that unshakable feminine obstinacy, rooted,
not in reason but in something rock-like, off which the arguments of
reason harmlessly glanced. He had a dim, realizing sense that at the
bottom of the woman’s illogical, whim-driven nature, there was that
indestructible foundation of blind, governing instincts, and that in
them lay her power.
“I guess that lets me out,” he said, turning to knock off the long ash
on his cigar. “I guess there’s no use, Rosey, for you and me to try to
come to an agreement on this matter.”
“No, there isn’t. And don’t let’s talk about it any more.” She turned
from the fire and came toward him. “But you must promise me one
thing--that that woman is to be let alone, that no one--you or any one
you have any control over--makes any more offers of money to her.”
She came to a stand beside his chair. He wanted to hold out his hand to
her as was his custom when she stood near him, but he was afraid that
she might not take it.
“Yes, I can promise that,” he said. “I’ll not offer her any more money.
I don’t want to see her again, God knows.”
It was an easier promise to make than Rose guessed. The old man, under
an air of mild concurrence in her demands, experienced a sensation of
cynical amusement at the thought that the first move for a reopening of
negotiations must come from Berny.
“Oh, yes, I’ll promise that,” he said amicably. “You needn’t be afraid
that I’m going to go on offering her a fortune. The thing’s been done,
the woman’s refused it, and there it stands. I’ve no desire to open it
again.”
She leaned down to take his hand. He relinquished it to her with an
immense lightening of his heart, and peace fell on him as he felt her
rub her cheek against his knuckles.
“So you’re not mad at the old man, after all?” he said almost shyly.
“No,” she murmured, “not at _him_. I was angry at what he was doing.”
It was a subtly feminine way of getting round the delicate points
of the situation--that inconsistently feminine way which separates
judgment of the individual from judgment of his acts. But it relieved
the Bonanza King of the heaviest weight that had lain upon him for many
years, and, for once, he gave thanks for the irrationalness of women.
“Well, good-night, honey,” he said, “no matter what crazy notions
you’ve got you’re the old man’s girl all right.”
She kissed him.
“And you won’t forget your promise?” she murmured.
“Of course not,” he said stoutly, not sure just what she was alluding
to. “Any promise I make to you stands put till the Day of Judgment.
Good night.”
When she left him, he lit another cigar, sank lower in his chair and
stared at the fire.
It was a deadlock. In his helplessness, the enraged helplessness of the
man who had ridden triumphantly over all obstacles that fate had set
in his path, his prevailing thought was how much he would like to kill
Berny. She had done all this. This viper of a woman, the kind to tread
on if she raised her head, had baffled and beaten them all. He could
not murder her, but he thought with grim lips of how he could crush and
grind her down and let her feel how heavy Bill Cannon’s hand could be.
It seemed for the moment as if everything were over. They had reached
a place where a blank wall stretched across the road. Berny’s refusing
the money had been a serious obstacle, but not an unconquerable one.
Rose to-night had given the whole plot its death blow. With lowering
brows he puffed at his cigar, groping in his mind for some way that
might yet be tried. He could not brook the thought of defeat. And yet
the more he meditated the more impregnable and unscalable appeared the
wall that stretched across the way.