Rich men's children

by Geraldine Bonner

In her own room she threw aside the lace curtains, and looking out on the splendor of the afternoon, determined to seek cheer in the open air. Like all Californians she had a belief in the healing beneficence of air and sunlight. As the sun had soothed Berny of her sense of care so now it wooed her enemy also to seek solace in its balm. She rang for the servant and ordered the carriage. A few minutes later, clad in rich enshrouding black, a small and fashionable bonnet perched on her head, she slowly made her way down stairs and out to the sidewalk where the victoria, glittering in the trim perfection of its appointments and drawn by a pair of well-matched chestnuts, stood at the curb.

The man on the box touched his hat with respectful greeting and the Chinese butler, who had accompanied her down the steps, arranged the rug over her knees and stepped back with the friendly “good-by,” which is the politeness of his race. They respected, feared, and liked her. Every domestic who had ever worked in Delia Ryan’s service from the first “hired girl” of her early Shasta days to the staff that now knew the rigors of her dominion, had found her a just and generous if exacting mistress. She had never been unfair, she had never been unkind. She was one of themselves and she knew how to manage them, how to make them understand that she was master, and that no drones were permitted in her hive; how to make them feel that she had a heart that sympathized with them, not as creatures of an alien class remotely removed from her own, but as fellow beings, having the same passions, griefs and hopes as herself.

As the carriage rolled forward she settled back against the cushioned seat and let her eyes roam over the prospect. It was the heart of the afternoon, still untouched by chill, not a breath stirring. Passing up the long drive which leads to the park, the dust raised by wheels hung ruddy in the air. The long shadows of trees striped the roadway in an irregular black pattern, picked out with spatterings of sunshine, like a spilled, gold liquid. Belts of fragrance, the breaths of flowering shrubs, extended from bushy coppices, and sometimes the keen, acrid odor of the eucalyptus rose on the air. From this lane of entrance the park spread fan-like into a still, gracious pleasance. The rich, golden light slept on level stretches of turf and thick mound-shaped groups of trees. The throb of music—the thin, ethereal music of out-of-doors—swelled and sank; the voices of children rose clear and fine from complicated distances, and once the raucous cry of a peacock split the quietness, seeming to break through the pictorial serenity of the lovely, dreamy scene.

Mrs. Ryan sat without movement, her face set in a sphinx-like profundity of expression. People in passing carriages bowed to her but she did not see them and their salutes went unreturned. Her vision was bent back on scenes of her past, so far removed from what made up the present, so different and remote from her life to-day, that it did not seem as if the same perspective could include two such extremes. Even her children were not links of connection between those old dead times and now. They had been born when Con’s fortunes were in the ascendant. They had known none of the privations of the brave days when she and her man had faced life together, young, and loving, and full of hope.

The carriage ascended a slight rise, and the sea, a glittering plain, lay in full view. It met the sky in a white dazzle of light. All its expanse coruscated as if each wave was crested with tinsel, and where they receded from the beach it was as though a web of white and shining tissue was drawn back, torn and glistening, from the restraining clutch of the sand. The smooth bareness of fawn-colored dunes swept back from the shore. They rose and fell in undulations, describing outlines of a suave, fluid grace, lovely as the forms of drifting snow, or the swell of waves. Ocean and dunes, for all the splendor of sky and sun that overarched and warmed them, suggested a gaunt, primeval desolation. They had the loneliness of the naked earth and the unconquerable sea—were a bit of the primordial world before man had tamed and softened it.

Mrs. Ryan swept them with a narrow, inward gaze which saw neither, but, in their place, the house in Virginia City, where she and Con had lived when they were first married in the early sixties. It was of “frame”—raw, yellow boards with narrow strips of wood nailed over every seam to keep the wind out. There had been a rough porch on one side where her wash-tub had stood. Out-of-doors there in the summer weather she had bent over the wash-board most of the day. She had made enough money to furnish the prospect hole that Con was working, with tools and miner’s supplies. Little Dick was born there; he had died afterward in Shasta. He used to lie in a wash-basket on the soiled linen in the sun. He would have been forty-five now, sixteen years older than Dominick.

She gave an order to the coachman who, drawing up, turned the horses, and the carriage started on its return trip. The sun was behind it, painting with level, orange rays the thick foliage of trees and the backs of foot passengers. Whatever it touched had the appearance of being overlaid with a gilded glaze through which its natural colors shone, deepened and brilliant.

Mrs. Ryan’s memories had leaped from Virginia City to Shasta. After Con’s prospect at Gold Hill had “petered” they had moved to California, been members of that discouraged route which poured, impoverished in pocket and enfeebled in health, from the wreck of the gutted Nevada camp back to their own Golden State and its beguiling promises. They had opened a grocery in Shasta in sixty-eight, first a little place where Con and she waited behind the counter, then, when they began to prosper, a big store on the corner. “Ryan’s” was written over the entrance in the beginning, when they had no money to spend, in black on a strip of canvas, after that in gold letters on a handsome sign. She had kept the books there while Con had managed the business, and they had done well. It was the beginning of their prosperity and how they had worked for it! Night after night up till midnight and the next morning awake before the birds. Two children had died there and three had been born. It had been a full life, a splendid life, the best a woman could know, working for her own, making them a place in the world, fighting her way up, shoulder to shoulder with her man.

Money had been her goal. She had not wanted to hoard it; of itself it meant nothing to her. She had wanted it for her children: to educate them better than she had been educated, to give them the advantages she had never known, to buy pleasures and position and consideration for them. She had felt the insignificance of poverty, and she was determined that they should never feel it. They should have the power that it seemed to Delia Ryan money alone gave, the thing she had none of, when, in her ragged girlhood, she winced and chafed under the dominance of those she felt to be her inferiors. She was a materialist by nature, and life had made her more of one. Money conquered, money broke the trail that led everywhere, money paid the gate entrance to all paradises. That was what she had always thought. And now when she was close on seventy, and her strength to fight for the old standards and ward off the creeping chill of age was weakened, she had come to realize that perhaps it was not the world-ruling power she had thought it. She had come to see it could turn upon one in strange ways. It carried power and it carried a curse. Dominick, whose life it was to have made brilliant, whose career it was to have crowned, Dominick had lost all through it.

She was thinking this as the carriage swept into the wider reach of the drive near the band stand. Though the music was still throbbing on the air, people were already leaving. Broken lines were detaching themselves from the seated mass in the chairs, disappearing among the trees, and straggling out into the road. The wheels of the victoria almost brushed the shoulders of a little party that moved in irregular file between the grass edge and the drive. Mrs. Ryan let her uninterested glance touch the hatted heads of the women and then move forward to the man who headed the column. He held by the hand a pretty, fair-haired child, who, leaning out from his restraining grasp, walked a little before him, looking back laughingly into his face. Mrs. Ryan’s eyes, alighting on his back, became suddenly charged with a fierce fixity of attention. The carriage overhauled him and before he looked up she leaned forward and saw his profile, the brow marked by a frown, the child’s gay prattle causing no responsive smile to break the brooding gravity that held his features.