He bowed with an air of irony that was so slight it might not have been noticed.
“Any messages from you will be received by me with pleasure. But when it comes to other things”—her hand was on the door-knob but she had to listen—“remember the little spider.”
“Rats!” she said furiously, and tore open the door.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Ryan,” he cried. “Good afternoon!”
She did not answer, but even in her excitement was conscious that the clerks behind the partition might be listening, and so shut the door, not with the bang her state of mind made natural, but with a soft, ladylike gentleness. Then she walked, with a tapping of little heels and a rustle of silken linings, down the long, narrow office and out into the street.
CHAPTER XXI
THE LION’S WHELP
It was late, almost dark, that evening when Cannon left his office. He had sat on after Berny’s departure, sunk in a reverie, which was not compounded of those gentle thoughts that are usually associated with that state of being. In the past, when he had been struggling up from poverty, he had had his fierce fights, and his mortifying defeats. He had risen from them tougher and more combative than ever, filled with the lust of vengeance which in the course of time was assuaged. But of late years few (and these antagonists of his own measure) had had the temerity to cross swords with him.
Now he had been defied in his stronghold and by the sort of person that he looked upon as a worm in the path—the kind of worm a man did not even tread on but simply brushed aside. It was incredible in its audacity, its bold insolence. As he walked down Montgomery Street to the car, he pondered on Berny, wonderingly and with a sort of begrudging, astonished admission of a courage that he could not but admire. What a nerve the woman had to dare to threaten him! To threaten Bill Cannon! There was something wild, uncanny, preposterous in it that was almost sublime, had the large, elemental quality of a lofty indifference to danger, that seemed to belong more to heroic legend than to modern life in the West. But his admiration was tempered by his alarm at the thought of his daughter’s learning of the sordid intrigue. The bare idea of Rose’s censuring him—and he knew she would if she ever learned of his part in the plot—was enough to make him decide that some particularly heavy punishment would be meted out to the woman who dared shatter the only ideal of him known to exist.
But he did not for a moment believe that Berny would tell. She was angry and was talking blusteringly, as angry women talk. He did not know why she was in such a state of ill temper, but at this stage of the proceedings he did not bother his head about that. For the third time she had refused the money—that was the only thing that concerned him. If she refused three hundred thousand dollars, she would refuse anything. It was as much to her as a million would be. She would know it was as large a sum as she could expect. If that would not buy her, nothing would. Her threats were nonsense, bluff and bluster; the important thing was, she had determined, for some reason of her own, to stick to Dominick Ryan.
How she had found out about Rose he could not imagine, only it was very enraging that she should have done so. It was the last, and most detestable fact in the whole disagreeable business. Brooding on the subject as the car swept him up the hill, he decided that she had guessed it. She was as sharp as a needle and she had put this and that together, the way women do, and had guessed the rest. Pure ugliness might be actuating her present line of conduct, and that state of mind was rarely of long duration. The jealous passions of women soon burn themselves out. Those shallow vessels could not long contain feelings of such a fiery potency, especially when harboring the feeling was so inconvenient and expensive. No one knew better than Berny how well worth her while it would be to cultivate a sweet reasonableness. This was the only gleam of hope left. Her power to endure the present conditions of her life might give out.