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[487] 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.
[488]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[489] 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[490] 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[491] 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[492] 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.
