She had been jealous of Rose since that fatal Sunday when she had discovered why Dominick was changed. It was not the jealousy of disprized love, it was not the jealousy of thwarted passion. It was a subtle compound of many ingredients, the main one a sense of bursting indignation that two people—one of them a possession of her own—should dare to seek for happiness where she had found only dullness and disappointment. She had an enraging premonition that Rose would probably succeed where she had failed. It made her not only jealous of Rose, it made her hate her.
Josh’s words increased this, and caused her suspicions, which, if not sleeping, had of late been dormant, to wake into excited activity. Dominick’s lonely Sunday walks she now saw shared by the girl who was trying to buy his freedom. Incidents that before she had taken at their face value now were suddenly fraught with disturbing significance. Why did Dominick go out so often in the evening? Since the moonlight night, he had been out twice, once not coming back till eleven. The confirmation of sight could hardly have made her more confident that he must spend these stolen hours with Rose Cannon in the palatial residence on Nob Hill. And it was not the most soothing feature in the case that Berny should picture them in one of the artistically-furnished parlors of which she had heard so much and seen nothing but the linings of the window curtains. Here, amid glories of upholstery, from the sight of which she was for ever debarred, Rose and Dominick talked of the time when he should be free. Berny, like the tiger lashing itself to fury with its own tail, thought of what they said, till she became sure her imaginings were facts; and the more she imagined, the more enraged and convinced she became.
She put from her mind all intention of ever taking the money. She wanted it desperately, terribly; she wanted it so much that when she thought of it it made her feel sick, but the joys of its possession were at the unrealizable distance of dreams, while the fact of her husband’s being enticed away by another woman was a thing of close, immediate concern, a matter of the moment, as if some one were trying to pick her pocket. As an appurtenance of hers, Dominick might not have been a source of happiness, but that was no reason why he should be a source of happiness to some one else.
Berny did not argue with any such compact clearness. She was less lucid, less defined and formulated in her ideas and desires than she had been when Bill Cannon made the first offer. Anger had thickened and obscured her clarity of vision. Suspicions, harbored and stimulated by a mind which wished for confirmation of the most extravagant, had destroyed the firm and well-outlined conception of what she wanted and was willing to fight for. In fact, she had passed the stage in the controversy when she was formidable because she stood with the strength of sincerity in her position, her demands, and refusals. Now the integrity of her defiance was gone. She wanted the money. She wanted to take it, and her refusal to do so was false to herself and to her standards.
She knew that the interview for which Bill Cannon had asked was for a last, deciding conversation. He was to make his final offer. It was a moment of torture to her when she wondered what it would be, and her mind hovered in distracted temptation over the certain two hundred thousand dollars and the possible quarter of a million. It was then that she whipped up her wrath, obscured for the moment by the mounting dizziness of cupidity, and thought of Rose and Dominick in the Japanese room, or the Turkish room, or the Persian room, into which she had never been admitted. The thought that they were making love received a last, corrosive bitterness from the fact that Berny could not see the beautiful and expensive surroundings of these sentimental passages.
She was in this state of feverish distractedness when she went to Bill Cannon’s office. She had chosen the last of the three days he had specified in his note, and had left the flat at the time he had mentioned as the latest hour at which he would be there. She had chosen the last day as a manner of indicating her languid interest in the matter to be discussed, and had also decided to be about fifteen minutes late, as it looked more indifferent, less eager. Bill Cannon would never know that she was dressed and ready half an hour before she started, and had lounged about the flat, watching the clocks, and starting at every unrecognized sound.
She was received with a flattering deference. As her footstep sounded on the sill of the outer office, a face was advanced toward one of the circular openings in the long partition, immediately disappeared, and then a door was thrown back to admit to her presence a good-looking, well-dressed young man. His manner was all deferential politeness. A murmur of her name, just touched with the delicately-questioning quality imparted by the faintest of rising inflections, accompanied his welcoming bow. Mr. Cannon was expecting her in the private office. Special instructions had been left that she should be at once admitted. Would she be kind enough to step this way?
Berny followed him down the long strip of outer office where it flanked the partition in which the regularly-recurring holes afforded glimpses of smooth bent heads. She walked lightly, and had an alert, wary air as though it might be a good thing to be prepared for an ambush. She had been rehearsing her part of the interview for days; and like other artists, now that the moment of her appearance was at hand, felt extremely nervous, and had a sense of girding herself up against unforeseen movements on the part of the foe.
Nothing, however, could have been more disarmingly friendly than the old man’s greeting. As the door opened and the clerk pronounced her name, he rose from his seat and welcomed her in a manner which was a subtle compound of simple cordiality and a sort of masonic, unexpressed understanding, as between two comrades bound together by a common interest. Sitting opposite him in one of the big leather chairs, she could not but feel some of her resentment melting away, and her stiffly-antagonistic pose losing something of its rigidity as he smiled indulgently on her, asking about herself, about Dominick, finally about her sisters, with whose names and positions he appeared flatteringly familiar.
Berny answered him cautiously. She made a grip at her receding anger, conscious that she needed all her sense of wrong to hold her own against this crafty enemy. Even when he told her he had heard with admiration and wonder of Hannah’s fine record in the primary school department, her smile was guarded, her answer one of brief and watchful reserve. She wished he would get to the point of the interview. Her mind could not comfortably contain two subjects at once, and it was crammed and running over with the all-important one of the money. Her eyes, fixed on him, did not stray to the furnishings of the room or the long windows that reached to the ceiling and through the dimmed panes of which men on the other side of the alley stood looking curiously down on her.