Rich men's children

by Geraldine Bonner

She was seven years older than he, but told him they were the same age. It was not a wasted lie, as she undoubtedly looked much younger than she was, being a slight, trimly-made woman who had retained a girlish elasticity of figure and sprightliness of manner. She came of respectable, hard-working people, her father, Danny Iverson, having been a contractor in a small way of business, and her two sisters being, one a teacher in the primary school department, the other a saleswoman in a fashionable millinery. She herself was an expert in her work, in office hours quiet, capable and businesslike, afterward lively, easy-going and companionable. The entrapping of young Ryan was a simple matter. He had never loved and knew little of women. He did not love her, but she made him think he did, threw herself at him, led him quickly to the point she wished to reach, and secretly, without a suspicion on the part of her family, became his mistress. Six months later, having driven him to the step by her upbraidings and her apparent sufferings of conscience under the sense of wrong-doing, she persuaded him to marry her.

The marriage was a bombshell to the world in which young Ryan was a planet of magnitude. His previous connection with her—though afterward discovered by his mother—was at the time unknown. Bernice had induced him to keep the marriage secret till its hour of accomplishment, for she knew Mrs. Ryan would try to break it off and feared that she might succeed. Once Dominick’s wife she thought that the objections and resentment of the elder woman could be overcome. But she underrated the force and obstinacy of her adversary and the depth of the wound that had been given her. Old Mrs. Ryan had been stricken in her tenderest spot. Her son was her idol, born in her middle-age, the last of four boys, three of whom had died in childhood. In his babyhood she had hoarded money and worked late and early that he might be rich. Now she held the great estate of her husband in trust for him, and dreamed of the time when he should marry some sweet and virtuous girl and she would have grandchildren to love and spoil and plan for. When the news of his marriage reached her and she saw the woman he had made his wife, she understood everything. She knew her boy through and through and she knew just how he had been duped and entangled.

She was of that race of pioneer Californians who had entered an uninhabited country, swept aside Indian and Spaniard, and made it their own. They were isolated figures in a huge landscape, their characters, uncramped and bold, developing unrestricted in an atmosphere of physical and moral liberty. They grew as their instincts dictated; the bough was not bent into convenient forms by expediency or pressure from without. Public opinion had little or no weight with them, for there was none. It was the pleasure of this remote group in this rich and exuberant land to do away with tradition and be a law and precept unto themselves. What other people thought and did did not influence them. They had one fixed, dominating idea in a fluctuating code of morals—they knew what they wanted and they were determined to get it. They were powerful individualities whether for good or evil, and they resented with a passion any thwarting of their plans or desires, whether by the interposition of man or the hand of God.

Delia Ryan’s life had been a long, ascending series of hardly-won triumphs. She had surmounted what would have seemed to a less bold spirit unsurmountable obstacles; gone over them, not around them. She had acquired the habit of success, of getting what she wanted. Failure or defiance of her plans amazed her as they might have amazed the confident, all-conquering, pagan gods. The center of her life was her family; for them she had labored, for them she would have died. Right and wrong in her mind were clearly defined till it came to her husband or children, and then they were transmuted into what benefited the Ryans and what did not. Rigidly fair and honorable in her dealings with the outside world, let a member of that world menace the happiness of one of her own, and she would sacrifice it, grind the ax without qualms, like a priestess grimly doing her duty.

The marriage of her son was the bitterest blow of her life. It came when she was old, stiffened into habits of dominance and dictatorship, when her ambitions for her boy were gaining daily in scope and splendor. A blind rage and determination to crush the woman were her first feelings, and remained with her but slightly mitigated by the softening passage of time. She was a partizan, a fighter, and she instituted a war against her daughter-in-law which she conducted with all the malignant bitterness that marks the quarrels of women.

Dominick had not been married a month when she discovered the previous connection between him and his wife, and published it to the winds. A social power, feared and obeyed, she let it be known that to any one who received Mrs. Dominick Ryan her doors would be for ever closed. Without withdrawing her friendship from her son she refused ever to meet or to receive his wife. In this attitude she was absolutely implacable. She imposed her will upon the less strong spirits about her, and young Mrs. Ryan was as completely shut off from her husband’s world as though her skirts carried contamination. With masculine largeness of view in other matters, in this one the elder woman exhibited a singular, unworthy smallness. The carelessly large checks she had previously given Dominick on his birthday and anniversaries ceased to appear, and masculine gifts, such as pipes, walking-sticks, and cigar-cases, in which his wife could have no participating enjoyment, took their place. She had established a policy of exclusion, and maintained it rigidly.

Young Mrs. Ryan had at first believed that this rancor would melt away with the flight of time. But she did not know the elder woman. She was as unmeltable as a granite rock. The separation from her son, now with age growing on her, ate like an acid into the mother’s heart. She saw him at intervals, and the change in him, the growth of discouragement, the dejection of spirit that he hid from all the world, but that her eye, clairvoyant from love, detected, tore her with helpless wrath and grief. She punished herself and punished him, sacrificed them both, in permitting herself the indulgence of her implacable indignation.

Bernice, who had expected to gain all from her connection with the all-powerful Ryans, at the end of two years found that she was an ostracized outsider from the world she had hoped to enter, and that the riches she had expected to enjoy were represented by the three thousand a year her husband earned in the bank. Her attempts to force her way into the life and surroundings where she had hoped her marriage would place her had invariably failed. If her feelings were not of the same nature as those of the elder Mrs. Ryan, they were fully as poignant and bitter.

The effort to get an invitation to the ball had been the most daring the young woman had yet made. Neither she nor Dominick had thought it possible that Mrs. Ryan would leave her out. So confident was she that she would be asked that she had ordered a dress for the occasion. But when Dominick’s invitation came without her name on the envelope, then fear that she was to be excluded rose clamorous in her. For days she talked and complained to her husband as to the injustice of this course and his power to secure the invitation for her if he would. By the evening of the ball she had brought him to the point where he had agreed to go forth and demand it.

It was a hateful mission. He had never in his life done anything so humiliating. In his shame and distress he had hoped that his mother would give it to him without urging, and Bernice, placated, would be restored to good humor and leave him at peace. She could not have gained such power over him, or so bent him to her bidding, had she not had in him a fulcrum of guilty obligation to work on. She continually reminded him of “the wrong” he had done her, and how, through him, she had lost the respect of her fellows and her place among them. All these slights, snubs and insults were his fault, and he felt that this was true. To-night he had gone forth in dogged desperation. Now in fear, frank fear of her, he went home, slowly, with reluctant feet, his heart getting heavier, his dread colder as he neared the house.