Looking ahead of her, she saw the landscape still as a picture under the slanting, lurid sunlight. It seemed to be painted with unnaturally glaring tints, to be soaked in color. The grass, crossed with long shadows, was of the greenness of an aniline dye. The massed foliage of tree groups showed a melting richness of shades, no one clearly defined, all fused in a thick, opaque lusciousness of greens. The air was motionless and very clear. Where a passing carriage stirred the dust the powdery cloud rose, spreading a tarnishing blur on the crystalline clarity of the scene. The sun injected these dust films with gold, and they settled slowly, as if it made them heavy like ground-up particles of metal.
Yet, to Berny, this hectic prospect looked gray; all color seemed sucked from it. It appeared pale and alien, its comfortable intimacy gone. She was like a stranger walking in a strange place, a forlorn, remote land, where she felt miserable and homesick. The sense of being dazed was passing from her. Walking forward with short, careful steps, she was slowly coming to the meaning of her discovery—adjusting herself to it, realizing its significance. She had an uncomfortable sensation of not being able to control the muscles round her mouth, so that if spoken to she would have had difficulty in answering, and would have been quite unable to smile.
An open carriage passed her, and she drew aside, then mechanically looked after it as it rolled forward. There was a single figure in it—a woman. Berny could see her head over the lowered hood, and the little parasol she held, white with a black lace cover and having a joint in the handle. Her eyes followed this receding head, moving so evenly against the background of trees. It soared along without sinking or rising, with the even, forward flight of a bird, passed Hannah and Josh and Hazel, turning to drop on them quick looks, which seemed, from its elevated position and the shortness of the inspection, to have something of disdain in them.
As the carriage drew near Dominick, who walked at the head of the line with Pearl by the hand, Berny saw the head move, lean forward, and then, as the vehicle overhauled and passed the young man, turn at right angles and bow to him. The wheel almost brushed his shoulder. He drew back from it with a start and lifted his hat. Hazel, who was walking just in front of Berny, turned and projecting her lips so that they stood out from her face in a red circle, hissed through them,
“Old Lady Ryan!” and then in a slightly louder key,
“You take a hatchet and I’ll take a saw,
And we’ll cut off the head of my mother-in-law.”
CHAPTER XIII
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.