This held her in the dead, motionless unconsciousness that a drug brings, through the long morning hours. Dominick’s noiseless departure hardly disturbed the hushed quiet of the little flat. The Chinaman, trained by his exacting mistress to make no sound while she slept, went about his work with a stealthy step and cautious touch, even in the kitchen, shut off by space and muffling doors, continuing his care. He had had more than one experience with the wrath of Mrs. Ryan when she had been roused from late slumbers by a banged door or a dropped pan.
It was nearly lunch-time when she awoke, slowly emerging from the black, unbroken deadness of her sleep to a momentarily augmenting sense of depression. She rose, her body seeming to participate in the oppressed discomfort of her mind, and, going to the bedroom window, drew the curtain and looked out.
The day promised little in the way of cheering influences. Fog hung heavy in the air, a gray veil depending from a gray haze of sky. That portion of her neighbor’s garden which the window commanded was drenched with it, the flowers drooping moistly as if it weighed on them like a heavy substance under the pressure of which they bent and dripped. The stretch of wall that she could see gleamed with dampness. A corner of stone, on which a drop regularly formed, hung and then fell, held her eyes for a few vacantly-staring moments. Then she turned away, muttering to herself,
“Good Lord, what a day!”
She was at her lunch when the telephone bell rang. She dropped her napkin and ran to the instrument which was in the hall. She did not know what she expected—or rather she did not expect anything in particular—but she was in that state of feverish tension when she seemed the focus of portentous happenings, the point upon which events of sinister menace might, at any moment, bear down. Bill Cannon might be calling her up, for what purpose she could not guess, only for something that would be disagreeable and perturbing.
It was, however, her husband’s voice that answered her. He spoke quickly, as if in a hurry, telling her that he would not be home to dinner, as a college friend of his from New York had just arrived and he would dine and go to the theater with him that evening. Berny’s ear, ready to discover, in the most alien subjects, matter bearing on her husband’s interest in Rose Cannon, listened intently for the man’s name. As Dominick did not give it she asked for it, and to her strained and waiting attention it seemed to come with an intentional indistinctness.
“What is his name?” she called again, her voice hard and high. “I didn’t catch it.”
It was repeated and for the second time she did not hear it. Before she could demand it once more, Dominick’s “Good-by” hummed along the wire and the connection was cut.
She did not want any more lunch and went into the parlor, where she sat down on the cushioned window-seat and looked out on the vaporous transparencies of the fog. She had waked with the sense of weight and apprehension heavy on her. As she dressed she had thought of the interview of yesterday with anger and also with something as much like fear as she was capable of feeling. She realized the folly of the rage she had shown, the folly and the futility of it, and she realized the danger of an open declaration of war with the fierce and unscrupulous old man who was her adversary. This, with her customary bold courage, she now tried to push from her mind. After all, he couldn’t kill her, and that was about the only other way he could get rid of her. Even Bill Cannon would hardly dare, in the present day in San Francisco, cold-bloodedly to murder a woman. The thought caused a slight, sarcastic smile to touch her lips. Fortunately for her, the lawless days of California were passed.
With the curtain caught between her finger-tips, her figure bent forward and motionless, she looked out into the street as if she saw something there of absorbing interest. But she saw nothing. All her mental activity was bent on the problem of Dominick’s telephone message. She did not believe it. She was in that state where trifles light as air all point one way, and to have Dominick stay out to dinner with a sudden and unexpected “friend from New York” was more than a trifle. She assured herself with slow, cold reiteration that he was dining with Rose Cannon in the big house on California Street. If they walked together on Sunday mornings, why shouldn’t they dine together on week-day nights? They were careful of appearances and they would never let themselves be seen together in any public place till they were formally engaged. The man from New York was a fiction. She—that immaculate, perfect girl—had invented him. Dominick could not invent anything. He was not that kind of man. But Berny knew that all women can lie when the occasion demands, and Rose Cannon could thus supply her lover’s deficiencies.