CHAPTER XIV
THE GOD DESCENDS
Two days after this momentous combination of her enemies, Berny was sitting in the parlor of her flat, writing a letter. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and she had just dressed herself for her daily jaunt down town, where she spent an hour or two looking into the shop windows, pricing articles of apparel, taking a glass of soda water, and stopping for chats with acquaintances under awnings and in open doorways. Her life was exceedingly barren of occupation and companionship. When she had married, she had dropped all work save such as seemed to her fitting for the wife of a rich man. Outside her sisters she had no friends. She knew the wives of several of the bank officials and to them, as representing a rise in the social scale, she clung hopefully. The letter she was now writing was to one of them who had taken a sick child to the country.
She had finished it, and was inscribing her signature, when a ring at the bell caught her ear. She raised her head listening, and then bent it again over the letter. Visitors were too rare at the Sacramento Street flat for her to cherish any delusive hopes. Writing the address in her best hand, she did not hear a foot ascending the stairs, nor know that it actually was a visitor, till a tap on the door-post of the room made her turn and ejaculate a startled “Come in!” The door that led from the parlor to the hall had been removed, and a bamboo portière hung in the opening. A large masculine hand thrust apart the hanging strands, and Bill Cannon, hat in hand, confident and yet apologetic, entered the room.
He had been surprised when he had seen how small and unpretentious was the home of Con Ryan’s only son. He was more than ever surprised when the Chinaman, with the unveiled impudence of those domestics when the employes of masters they do not like, had waved his proffered card aside, and with a jerk of his head motioned him forward to a doorway at the end of the passage. Now, on entering, he took in, in an impressionistic sweep, the overcrowded, vulgar garishness of the little room, saturated with the perfume of scents and sachets, and seeming to be the fitting frame for the woman who rose from a seat by the desk.
She looked at him inquiringly with something of wariness and distrust in her face. She was the last of the ascending scale of surprises he had encountered, for she was altogether better-looking, more a person to be reckoned with, than he had expected. His quick eye, trained to read human nature, recognized the steely determination of this woman before she spoke, saw it in the level scrutiny of her eyes, in the decision of her close mouth. He felt a sensation, oft experienced and keenly pleasurable, of gathering himself together for effort. It was the instinct of an old warrior who loves the fray.
Berny, on her side, knew him at the first glance, and her sensations were those of disturbance and uneasiness. She remembered him to be a friend of the Ryans’, and she had arrived at the stage when any friend of the Ryans’ was an enemy of hers. She was instantly in arms and on the defensive. Rose had not yet taken shape in her mind as a new, menacing force conniving against her. Besides, she had no idea that Rose reciprocated the sentiment that Dominick cherished for her. Her discovery had only made her certain that Dominick loved another woman. But this had shaken her confidence in everything, and she looked at the old man guardedly, ready for an attack and bracing herself to meet it.
“You’ll pardon this intrusion, won’t you?” he said in a deep, friendly voice, and with a manner of cordial urbanity. “I tried to do it correctly, but the Chinaman had other designs. It was he who frustrated me. Here’s the card I wanted him to take to you.”
He approached her, holding out a card which she took, still unsmiling, and glanced at. Her instinct of dissimulation was strong, and, uneasy as she was, she pretended to read the name, not wanting him to see that she already knew him.
“Mr. William G. Cannon,” she read, and then looked up at him and made a slight inclination of her head as she had seen actresses do on the stage. “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Cannon?” she added, and completed the impressiveness of her greeting by a gesture, which also suggested a histrionic origin, toward an adjacent chair.
He backed toward the chair, pulling it out into the unencumbered space in the middle of the floor, his movements deliberate and full of design, as if he felt comfortably at home. Subsiding into the seat, which had arms and was rather cramped for his large bulk, he laid his hat among the knick-knacks of a near-by table and said smilingly,