“All right,” he said, “I’ll tell her. Good-night, mother.”
“Good-night, Dominick,” came the answer.
“Good-night, Cornie,” he said in a muffled voice and left the room.
He passed through the brilliantly bright, flower-scented parlors and was shown out by the strange man-servant. The crowd at the mouth of the canvas tunnel had increased. Clumps of staring white faces edged the opening and presented themselves to his eye, not like reality, but like a painting of pale visages executed on the background of the night. They drew away as he approached them, making a lane of egress for him, then turned and eyed him—a deserter from the realms of joy—as he stopped by a lamp-post to look at his watch. A quarter past ten. He had been in the house only fifteen minutes. He did not need to go home for a while yet. He could walk about and think and arrange how he would tell Berny.
He was a man in the full vigor of his youth, strong and brave, yet at this moment he feared, feared as a child or a timid woman might fear, the thought of his wife. He dreaded to meet her; he shrank from it, and to put it off he wandered about the familiar streets, up one and down the other, trying to overcome his sick reluctance, trying to make up his mind to go to her, trying to conquer his fear.
CHAPTER III
THE DAUGHTER OF HETH
He walked for nearly an hour, along quiet, lamp-lit streets where large houses fronted on gardens that exhaled moist earth scents and the breaths of sweet, unseen blossoms, up hills so steep that it seemed as if an earthquake might have heaved up the city’s crust and bent it crisply like a piece of cardboard. From these high places he looked down on the expanse of the bay, a stretch of ink surrounded by black hills, here and there spangled with the clustered sparklings of little towns. In the hollows below him he saw the lights of the city swimming on its darkness, winking and trembling on receding depths of blackness, like golden bubbles seething on the surface of thick, dense wine.
He looked down unseeing, thinking of the last three years.
When he had first met Bernice Iverson, she had been a typewriter and stenographer in the office of the Merchants and Mechanics Trust Company. He was twenty-four at the time, the only son of Cornelius Ryan, one of the financial magnates of the far West. The career of Con Ryan, as he was familiarly called, had been as varied as the heart of a public, who loves to dwell on the sensational fortunes of its great men, could have wished. In the early days of Virginia City, Con Ryan had been a miner there, had a claim of his own and lost all he had in it before the first Crown Point excitement, had run a grocery store in Shasta, moved to Sacramento, speculated successfully in mining stock and real estate, and in the bonanza days had had money to play the great game which made millionaires of the few and beggars of the many. He had played it daringly and with profit. When he died he left his widow complete control of a fortune of ten millions.
She had been a sturdy helpmeet—it was generally said that she was the best man of the two—and would keep the fortune safe for the two children, Dominick and Cornelia. Neither she nor Con believed in young men having control of large fortunes. They had seen what came of it in the sons of their bonanza friends. Dominick was sent to the East to college, and on his return, being then twenty-three years of age, was placed in the Oregon and California Bank, of which his father had been one of the founders. He was soon promoted to a position where he earned a salary of three thousand a year. This was all he had when he met Bernice Iverson.