As he felt the vibration of the wheel at his shoulder he started aside and looked up. When he recognized his mother his face reddened, and, with a quick smile, he lifted his hat. Her returning salute was serious, almost tragically somber. Then the victoria swept on, and he and the child, neither for a moment speaking, looked after the bonneted head that soared away before them with a level, forward vibration, like a floating bird, the little parasol held stiffly erect on its jointed handle.
As Mrs. Ryan passed down the long park entrance she thought no more of the past. The sight of her son, heading the file of his wife’s relations, his face set in an expression of heavy dejection, scattered her dreams of retrospect with a shattering impact. She had never seen him look so frankly wretched; and to intensify the effect of his wretchedness was the sprawling line of Iversons which surrounded him. They seemed, to her furious indignation, like a guard cutting him off from his kind, imprisoning him, keeping him for themselves. They were publicly dragging him at their chariot wheels for all the world to see. His wife instead of getting less was getting more power over him. She had made him ask for the invitation to the ball and now she made him escort herself and her sisters about on holidays.
The old woman’s face was dark with passion, her pale lips set into a tight line. Money! Money might make trouble and bring disappointment, but it would talk to those people. Money was all they were after. Well, they could have it!
She let three days go by before she made the move she had determined on ten minutes after she had passed Dominick. The Wednesday morning following that Sunday—apparently a day of innocuous and simple happenings, really so fraught with Fate—she put on her outdoor things and, dispensing with the carriage, went down town on the car to see Bill Cannon.
The Bonanza King’s office was on the first floor of a building owned by himself on one of the finest Montgomery Street corners. It had been built in the flush times of the Comstock and belonged to that epoch of San Francisco architecture where long lines of windows were separated by short columns and overarched by ornate embellishments in wood. As Mrs. Ryan approached, the gold letters on these windows gleamed bravely in the sun. They glittered even on the top-story casements, and her eye, traveling over them, saw that they spelled names of worth, good tenants who would add to the dignity and revenues of such an edifice. She owned the corner opposite, and it gave her a pang of emulative envy to notice how shabby her building looked, a relic of the sixties which showed its antiquity in walls of brick, painted brown, and a restrained meagerness of decoration in the matter of cornices. For some time she had been thinking of tearing it down and raising a new, up-to-date structure on the site. It would yield a fine interest on the investment and be a good wedding jointure for Cornelia.
With her approach heralded by a rustling of rich stuffs and a subdued panting, she entered the office. A long partition down one side of the room shut off an inner sanctum of clerks. Through circular openings she could see their faces, raised expectantly from ledgers as their ears caught the frou-frou of skirts and a step, which, though heavy, was undoubtedly feminine. She stopped at one of the circular openings where the raised face looked older and graver than its fellows, and inquired for Mr. Cannon, giving her name. In a moment the clerk was beside her, knocking at a door which gave egress to still more sacred inner precincts. Opening this, he bowed her into the dimly-lit solemnity of the Bonanza King’s private office. Back in the outer room among the clerks he relieved the strained curiosity of their faces with the remark,
“Greek’s meeting Greek in there. It’s Mrs. Con Ryan.”
The private office looked out on an alley shut in a perpetual twilight by the towering walls of surrounding buildings. The long windows that ran from the floor to the ceiling could not let in enough light ever to make it a bright room, and the something of dimness seemed appropriate to the few massive pieces of furniture and the great safe in the corner, with its lock glimmering from the dusk of continual shadow. Men from windows across the alley could look into the office and see to whom Bill Cannon was talking, and it was known that, for this reason, he had another suite of rooms on one of the upper floors. But that that most competent of business women, Con Ryan’s widow, should come to his lair to parley with him was natural enough, and if the watchers across the alley saw her it only added to their sober respect for the man who was visited in his office by the richest woman in California.
She did not waste time beating about the bush. Sitting beside the desk, facing the pale light from the long windows, she very quickly plunged into the matter of her errand. It was a renewal of the conversation of the previous Sunday. Cannon sat in his swivel chair, looking meditatively at her. He had expected her, but not so soon, and as he watched her his face showed a mild friendly surprise breaking through its observant attention. It would have been difficult for any one, even so astute a woman as Mrs. Ryan, to guess that her request for his assistance in severing Dominick’s marriage bonds was affording the old man the keenest gratification.
Their talk lasted nearly an hour. Before the interview ended they had threshed out every aspect of the matter under discussion. There would be no loose ends or slighted details in any piece of work which engaged the attention of this bold and energetic pair of conspirators. The men on the other side of the alley looked down on them, wondering what business was afoot between Mrs. Con Ryan and Bill Cannon, that they talked so long in the big dim office with its gloomy mahogany furniture and the great black safe looming up in the corner.