THE STORM CENTER MOVES
As soon as Berny had left his office Bill Cannon wrote a note to
Mrs. Ryan, telling her of the interview he had just had with her
daughter-in-law. He did not mention the check, simply stating Berny’s
decision to accept their proposal and leave her husband. The matter was
of too intimate a nature to trust to the telephone and he sent the note
by one of his own clerks, who had instructions to wait for an answer,
as the old man did not know what Mrs. Ryan might already have heard
from Dominick.
It threw its recipient into a state of agitated, quivering exultation.
Mrs. Ryan had heard nothing from her son, and her hopes of the
separation had sunk to the lowest ebb. Not so prudent as Cannon, she
called up Dominick at the bank, asking him if it were true that his
wife had left him, and beseeching him simply to tell her “yes” or “no.”
The young man, hampered by the publicity of his surroundings and his
promise to Berny, answered her with the utmost brevity, telling her
that there had been a change in his domestic life but that he could not
enter into details now. He begged her to ask him no further questions
as he would be at home at three o’clock that afternoon, when he would
explain the whole matter to her.
She wrote this to the Bonanza King and sent it by his waiting
messenger. The old man felt relieved when he read the letter. He was
confident now that Berny had not deceived him. She had told the truth,
and was leaving the town and her husband, for what reason he could not
yet be sure, but there seemed no doubt that she was going. They would
ignore the subject before Rose, and, in the course of time, Dominick
would break down the unflinching resistance she had threatened to make
to his suit. The old man felt buoyant and exhilarated. It looked as if
things were at last going their way.
He sent a message to Mrs. Ryan, asking her to let him know as soon as
possible what Dominick said, and waited in his office in a state of
tension very foreign to his usual iron stolidity. It was four o’clock
before word came from her in the form of a telephone message, demanding
his presence at her house at the earliest possible moment. He responded
to it at once, and in the sitting-room of the Ryan mansion heard from
Dominick’s own lips the story of his false and tragic marriage.
The old man listened, unwinking, speechless, immovable. It was the one
thing he had never thought of, a solution of the situation that was as
completely unexpected to him as death would have been. He said nothing
to Dominick about the money he had given Berny, did not mention having
seen her. A sharp observer might have noticed that he looked a little
blank, that, the first shock of surprise over, there was a slight
expression of wandering attention in his eye, a suggestion of mental
faculties inwardly focusing on an unseen point, about his manner.
He walked home, deeply thinking, abashed a little by the ease with
which Fate unties the knots that man’s clumsy fingers work over in
vain. And it was untied. They were free--the boy and girl he loved--to
realize his and their own dreams. It would need no years of wooing to
melt Rose from stony resistance. Nobody had been sacrificed.
He felt a sense of gratitude toward Berny. Down in his heart he
was conscious of a stirring of something that was kindly, almost
affectionate, toward her. It did not require a great stretch of
imagination to see himself and her as two knowing, world-battered
rogues who had combined to let youth and innocence have their
happiness. He could almost feel the partnership with her she had spoken
of, a sort of bond of Masonic understanding, a kindred attitude in
matters of ethics. They had a mutually low estimate of human nature,
a bold, cool unscrupulousness, a daring courage that never faltered.
In fact, he was sorry he had not given Berny the whole fifty thousand
dollars.
“She could have got it out of me,” he said to himself, pondering
pensively. “If she’d stuck out for it I’d have given it to her. And she
might just as well have had it.”
That evening for the first time in nearly three years Dominick Ryan
dined with his mother in the great dining-room of the Ryan mansion.
Cornelia was out with Jack Duffy, so Mrs. Ryan had her boy all to
herself and she beamed and glowed and gloated on him as he sat opposite
her, the reddened light of the candles falling on his beloved, familiar
face.
After dinner they went into the sitting-room, the sanctum with the
ebonized cherry furniture where the family always retired when
important matters were afoot. Here, side by side, they sat before the
fireplace with the portrait of the late Cornelius Ryan looking benignly
down on them. They did not talk much. The subject of the young man’s
marriage had been thoroughly gone over in the afternoon. Later on, his
mother would extract from him further particulars, till she would be as
conversant with that miserable chapter of his life as if she had lived
it herself.
To-night they were both in the quiescent state that follows turmoil
and strife. They sat close together, staring into space, now and then
dropping one of the short disconnected sentences that indicate a fused,
understanding intimacy. The young man’s body was limp in his chair, his
mind lulled in the restorative lethargy, the suspension of activities,
that follows a struggle. His thoughts shrank shudderingly from the
past, and did not seek to penetrate the future. He rested in a torpor
of relief through which a dreamy sense of happiness came dimly, as if
in the faintest, most delicate whispers.
His mother’s musings were definite and practical. She could now make
that settlement, share and share alike, on both children that she
had long desired--Cornelia’s would be a dowry on her wedding day and
Dominick’s--well, Dominick had had hard times enough. She would go down
to-morrow morning and see her lawyer about it.
At the same hour, in the house of the other rich man, the Bonanza King,
having driven the servants from the room with violent words that did
not indicate bad humor so much as high spirits, told his daughter the
story. He told it shortly, hardly more than the main facts, and when it
was concluded, forbore to make comments or, in fact, to look at her.
It was a great deliverance, but he was not quite sure that his darling
would experience the frank, unadulterated joy that had possessed both
himself and Mrs. Ryan without restraining qualms. He did not know what
to say to Rose. There were mysterious complexities in her character
that made him decide to confine his statement to a recital of facts,
eliminating those candid expressions of feeling which he could permit
himself when talking to Mrs. Ryan or Berny.
As soon as he had told it all he rose from his chair as if ending the
interview. His daughter rose too, pale and silent, and he put his arm
round her shoulders and pressed her against his chest in a good-night
hug. She kissed him and went up stairs to her own rooms, and he
returned to his arm-chair at the end of the dining-table. Here, as was
his wont, he sat smoking and pondering, turning over in his head the
various aspects of the curious story and its unexpected outcome. Once,
as the memory of Berny weeping into his handkerchief recurred to him,
he stirred uneasily and muttered to himself,
“Why didn’t the damned fool stick out for the whole fifty thousand? I’d
have given it to her as soon as not.”
Meantime the storm center, the focus round which the hopes and angers
and fears of this little group had circled, was speeding eastward in
the darkness of the early night. Berny sat in the corner of her section
with her luggage piled high on the seat before her, a pillow behind her
head. In the brightly clear light, intensified by reflections from
glazed woodwork and the surfaces of mirrors, she looked less haggard,
calmer and steadier, than she had looked for many weeks. Relief was at
her heart. Now that she had turned her back on it she realized how she
had hated it all--the flat, the isolation, the unsuccessful struggle,
Dominick and his superior ways.
The excitement of change, the desire of the new, the unfamiliar, the
untried, which had taken her far afield once before, sang in her blood
and whispered its siren song in her ear. She had missed a fortune, but
still she had something. She was not plunging penniless into the great
outside world, and she pressed her hand against her chest where the
thirty-five thousand dollars was sewed into the lining of her bodice.
Thirty-five thousand dollars! It was a good deal if it wasn’t three
hundred thousand.
As the train thundered on through the darkness she saw before her the
lights of great cities, and heard the call of liberty, the call of the
nomad and the social vagabond, the call of the noisy thoroughfare, of
the bright places, of the tumult and the crowd. The roving passion of
the wanderer, to whom the spell of home is faint as a whisper in the
night, passed into her veins like the invigorating heat of wine. She
exulted in the sense of her freedom, in the magic of adventure, in the
wild independence of the unknown.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.