She sat forward, listening to his descending feet and the bang of the hall door. A glance at the window showed her it was, as he said, a fine night, deluged with the radiance of the moon. Probably he was just going out for a walk and not to see anybody. He was always doing queer things like that. But,—Berny sat staring in front of her, biting her nails and thinking. Uneasiness had been planted in her by Dominick’s flight to Antelope. More poignant uneasiness had followed that first attack. Now the bitter corrosive of jealousy began to grow and expand in her. Sitting huddled on the divan, she thought of Dominick, walking through the moonlight to Rose Cannon, and another new and griping pang laid hold upon her.
Outside, Dominick walked slowly, keeping to the smaller and less frequented streets. It was a wonderful night, as still as though the moon had exerted some mesmeric influence upon the earth. Everything was held motionless and without sound in a trance-like quietude. In the gardens not a blossom stirred. Where leaves extended from undefined darknesses of foliage, they stood out, stem and fiber, with a carven distinctness, their shadows painted on the asphalt walks in inky silhouette. There was no lamplight to warm the clear, still pallor of the street’s vista. It stretched between the fronts of houses, a river of light, white and mysterious, like a path in a dream.
It was a night for lovers, for trysts, and for whispered vows. Dominick walked slowly, feeling himself an outsider in its passionate enchantment. The scents that the gardens gave out, and through which he passed as through zones of sweetness, were part of it. So were the sounds that rose from the blotted vagueness of white figures on a porch, from impenetrable depths of shadow—laughter, low voices, little cries. In the distance people were singing snatches of a song that rose and fell, breaking out suddenly and as suddenly dropping into silence.
His course was not aimless, and took him by a slow upward ascent to that high point of the city, whence the watcher can look down on the bay, the rugged, engirdling hills, and the hollow of North Beach. Here he stood, resting on his cane, and gazing on the far-flung panorama, with the white moon sailing high and its reflection glittering across the water. Along the bases of the hills the clotted lights of little towns shone in faintly-glimmering agglomerations. At his feet the hollow lay like a black hole specked with hundreds of sparks. Each spark was the light of a home, symbol of the fire of a hearth. He stood looking down on them, thinking of what they represented, that cherished center round which a man’s life revolves, and which he, by his own sin and folly, had lost for ever.
He walked on, skirting the hollow, and moving forward through streets where old houses brooded in overgrown gardens. The thin music of strings rose on the night, and two men passed him playing on the mandolin and guitar. They walked with quick, elastic steps, their playing accurately in accord, their bodies swaying slightly to its rhythm. They swung by him, and the vibrating harmonies, that sounded so frail and attenuated in the suave largeness of the night, grew faint and fainter, as if weighed upon and gradually extinguished by the dense saturation of the moonlight.
Music was evidently a mode of expression that found favor on this evening of still brilliance. A few moments later a sound of singing rose on the air and a youthful couple came into view, walking close together, their arms twined about each other, caroling in serene indifference to such wayfarers as they might meet. They passed him, their faces uplifted to the light, their mouths open in the abandon of their song. Unconscious of his presence, with upraised eyes and clasping arms, they paced on, filling the night with their voices—a boy and girl in love, singing in the moonlight. Dominick quickened his steps, hastening from the sound.
The moon was now high in the sky and the town lay dreaming under its spell. Below him he could see the expanse of flat roofs, shining surfaces between inlayings of shadow, with the clefts of the streets cut through at regular intervals like slices made by a giant knife. Now and then he looked up at the dome above, clear and solemn, the great disk floating in solitary majesty across the vast and thoughtful heaven.
That part of California Street which crested the hill was but a few blocks beyond him, and before his mind would acknowledge it, his feet had borne him that way. He thought only to pass the Cannon house, to look at its windows, and see their lights. As it rose before him, a huge, pale mass checkered with shadows, the longing to see it—the outer shell that hid his heart’s desire—passed into a keener, concentrated agitation that seemed to press out from his soul like a cry to her.
The porch yawned black behind pillars that in the daytime were painted wood and now looked like temple columns wrought in marble. Dominick’s glance, sweeping the lines of yellowed windows, finally rested on this cavern of shadow, and he approached stealthily, as a robber might, his body close to the iron fence. Almost before his eyes had told him, he knew that a woman was standing there, leaning against the balustrade that stretched between the columns. A climbing rose spread, in a mottling of darkness, over the wall beside her. Here and there it was starred with the small white faces of blossoms. As the young man drew near she leaned over the balustrade, plucked one of the blossoms, and, slowly shredding the leaves from the stem, stretched out her hand and let them fall, like a languid shower of silver drops, to the grass.
Dominick halted below her, leaning against the fence and looking up. She did not see him and stretched out her hand again for another blossom. The petals of this one fell through her fingers, one by one, and lay, a scattering of white dots, on the darkness of the grass. She bent over the balustrade to look at them, and in doing so, her eyes encountered the man below.