And it showed her her power. Standing in the middle of the room with her eyes still staring at the now motionless portière strands, she saw, stretching away into a limitless gilded distance, her negotiations with her husband’s family. If their desire to rupture the marriage took them thus far, where might it not take them? She stared into a future where she saw herself extracting money in vast amounts from them. It was fortune—twice, three times this first paltry sum—waiting for her when she chose to stretch her hand and take it. She could be rich, as the old man said; she could go abroad, see the world, have all the joys that riches give, when she chose to let Mrs. Ryan humbly pay her such a sum as she would accept.
With a quick catch of her breath, she turned and moved to the window, stirred to her depth with the exultation of unexpected power. And standing there, the thought of the old man suddenly swept across her, and with it, transfixing her in an attitude of frozen, inward contemplation, the memory of his daughter. New vistas, extending away through the abruptly-illuminated dimness of her previous ignorance, suddenly opened before her, and she sent her startled vision exploring down them. At the end of them, waiting for Dominick in an attitude of welcome, was the pink and white girl she had seen in the park.
The discovery was made so quickly, came upon her flushed complacency with such a shock of unexpectedness, that even her sharp, suspicious mind could not for the moment take it in. Then Miss Cannon’s face, as she had seen it in that moment of recognition in the park, rose with confirming clearness on her memory, and she saw straight to the heart of the plot. It was not the Ryans alone who wanted to buy her off. It was the Cannons as well. They not only wanted Dominick to get rid of her; they wanted him to get rid of her so that he could marry Rose Cannon. The other girl was behind it all, accounted for the participation of the Bonanza King, accounted probably for the whole move—the pink and white girl in the French clothes who had all her life had everything and now wanted Berny Iverson’s husband.
Poor Dominick, whom Berny had held contemptuously as a disappointing and aggravating appurtenance of hers, suddenly rose in her estimation into a valuable possession whose worth she had not before realized. It was enough that another woman wanted him, was, through underhand channels, trying to get him. All in a minute, Berny had changed from the negligent proprietor of a valueless and lightly-held object, to the possessor of an article of rare worth, which she was prepared jealously to guard. With a sort of proud challenge she felt that she stood valiantly facing the marauders, protecting her treasure against their predatory advances. And her hatred against Mrs. Ryan began to extend toward Bill Cannon, and beyond him toward the fair-faced girl, who grew red to her forehead when she accidentally encountered Dominick Ryan.
CHAPTER XV
THE MOONLIGHT NIGHT
A few nights after this, there was a full moon. Dominick, walking home from the bank, saw it at the end of the street’s vista, a large, yellowish-pink disk floating up into the twilight. The air about it was suffused with a misty radiance, and its wide glowing face, having a thin look like a transparency of paper with a light behind it, seemed, though not yet clear of the housetops, already to dominate the sky. The evening was warm, like the early summer in other climates; and Dominick, walking slowly and watching the great yellow sphere deepening in color as it swam majestically upward, thought of evenings like this in the past when he had been full of the joy of life and had gone forth in the spirit of love and adventure.
The sight of his home dispelled these memories and brought upon him the sense of his daily environment and its distastefulness. The determination to accept his fate which had been with him on his return from Antelope had of late been shaken by stirrings of rebellion. Uplifted by the thought of his love for a woman hopelessly removed from him, but who would always be a lodestar to worship reverently and to guide him up difficult paths, he had been able to face his domestic tragedy with the high resolution of the martyr. But this exalted condition was hard to maintain in the friction of daily life with Berny. Before, she had merely been a disagreeable companion of whom he had to make the best. Now, she was that, intensified by a comparison which threw out her every fault and petty vulgarity into glaring prominence. And more than that—she was the angel with the flaming sword, the self-incurred, invited, domesticated angel—the angel come to stay—who barred the way to Paradise.
She seemed to him to have changed within the last week. When he had first come home from Antelope she had been Berny in one of her less familiar but recognizable moods—Berny trying to be agreeable, wearing her best clothes every day, ordering the things for dinner he liked, talking loudly and incessantly. Then, quite suddenly, he became aware of a change in her. She grew silent, absent-minded, morose. He had tried to make their lives easier by always being polite and carefully considerate of her and she had responded to it. For the last few days she had made no effort to assist him in this laudable design. Instead, she had been unresponsive, preoccupied, uninvitingly snappish in her replies. Several times he had been forced into the novel position of “making conversation” throughout dinner, exerting his wits for subjects to talk about that he might lift the gloom and elicit some response from the mute, scowling woman opposite.
To-night, the period of ill-humor seemed over. Berny was not only once again her animated self, she was almost feverishly garrulous. Dinner had not progressed past the fish when she began to question him on his recent experiences at Antelope. The subject had come up several times since his return, but for the last few days he had had a respite from it, and hoped its interest had worn away. She had many queries to make about Bill Cannon, and from the father it was but a natural transition to the daughter, so much the more attractive of the pair. Dominick was soon inwardly writhing under an exceedingly ingenious and searching catechism.
Had he been less preoccupied by his own acute discomfort, he might have noticed that Berny herself gave evidence of disturbance. As she prodded him with her questions, her face was suffused with unusual color, and the eagerness of her curiosity shone through the carelessness with which she sought to veil it. Certain queries she accompanied with a piercing glance of investigation, watching with hungry sharpness the countenance of the persecuted man. Fearful of angering her, or, still worse, of arousing her suspicions, Dominick bore the examination with all the fortitude he had, but he rose from the table with every nerve tingling, rasped and galled to the limit of endurance.