She turned away as she spoke and without a backward look walked rapidly down the gravel walk to the street. With an immovable, unwinking gaze, Berny followed her figure as it melted into the fog. It seemed only a moment before it was gone, appearing to dissolve into the curd-like currents that surrounded it.
Berny sat without moving on the bench, staring in the direction in which it had disappeared. Her hands lay limp in her lap, the fog beaded in a crystal hoar on her clothes. She did not notice its growing chill nor the rapid downcoming of the dark. Her body was as motionless as a statue, but her mind was like a still, rankly-overgrown lake, suddenly churned into activity by unexpected gales of wind.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE WALL ACROSS THE WAY
It was dark when Rose reached home. She had walked rapidly, mechanically taking familiar turns, cresting the long slope of the hill at a panting speed, rounding corners where gushes of light revealed her as a dark, flitting figure hurrying by almost at a run.
She was as oblivious to her surroundings as Berny, left motionless on the park bench. Never before in her life had anything like this touched her. Such few troubles as she had known had been those of a sheltered domestic life—the life of a cherished child whose dainty self-respect had never been blurred by a coarse breath. Now had come this horrible revelation. It shook the pretty world she had lived in like an earthquake. Idols lay broken in the dust. She had often seen her father rough and brutal as he was to Gene, but that was a different thing to her father’s buying that wretched woman’s husband, buying him for her. Berny’s face rose upon the darkness with its pitiful assumption of jaunty bravado, its mean shrewishness under the coating of powder and rouge.
“How could they do it?” the girl panted to herself. “How could they ever do such a thing?”
She did not suspect Dominick. She could not have believed he was party to such an action unless he had told her so with his own lips. As she hurried on the thought that this was the woman he had bound himself to for the rest of his life mingled with the other more poignantly-hateful thoughts, with a last sickening sense of wretchedness. The sudden, aghast consciousness of chaos, of an abrupt demolishing of the pleasant, familiar settings of a life that never comes to some, came to Rose that evening as she ran home through the fog.
She entered the house noiselessly and sped up to her room. It was time to dress for dinner, and an old woman-servant who had once been her nurse was waiting to help her. The mistress and maid were on terms of affectionate intimacy and the progress of the toilet was generally enlivened by gossip and laughter. To-night the girl was singularly silent, responding with monosyllables and sometimes not at all to the remarks of her assistant. As the woman drew the fastenings of the dress together, she could feel that the body the gown clipped so closely quivered, like the casing of machinery, vibrating to powerful concussions within.
The silence that continued to hold her throughout dinner passed unnoticed, as Gene was there and enlivened the passage of the meal by contributing an almost unbroken stream of talk. The night before he had been to a play, the plot of which, and its development in four acts, he now related with a fullness of detail which testified to the closeness of his attention and the accuracy of his memory. As each course was removed from the table, and the young man could once more give his undivided attention to the matter of discourse, he leaned back in his chair and took up the dropped thread with a fresh zest and some such remarks as:
“In the beginning of the next act, the hero comes in with his hat on, and first he says”—and so on.