“And you won’t forget your promise?” she murmured.
“Of course not,” he said stoutly, not sure just what she was alluding to. “Any promise I make to you stands put till the Day of Judgment. Good night.”
When she left him, he lit another cigar, sank lower in his chair and stared at the fire.
It was a deadlock. In his helplessness, the enraged helplessness of the man who had ridden triumphantly over all obstacles that fate had set in his path, his prevailing thought was how much he would like to kill Berny. She had done all this. This viper of a woman, the kind to tread on if she raised her head, had baffled and beaten them all. He could not murder her, but he thought with grim lips of how he could crush and grind her down and let her feel how heavy Bill Cannon’s hand could be.
It seemed for the moment as if everything were over. They had reached a place where a blank wall stretched across the road. Berny’s refusing the money had been a serious obstacle, but not an unconquerable one. Rose to-night had given the whole plot its death blow. With lowering brows he puffed at his cigar, groping in his mind for some way that might yet be tried. He could not brook the thought of defeat. And yet the more he meditated the more impregnable and unscalable appeared the wall that stretched across the way.
CHAPTER XXIV
FRIEND OR FOE
For some time after Rose had left her, Berny remained on the bench, not moving, her glance resting on that part of the path whence the young girl’s figure had faded from view.
The night slowly deepened, impregnating the gray atmosphere with a velvety depth of shadow that oozed through it like an infusion of a darker, denser element. Lights came out. First sporadically, here and there blooming through the opaque dusk, not suddenly, but with an effect of gradualness, as though the air was so thick it took some time to break through it. Then came more. Rows of windows appeared in long, magnified sputters. All round the plaza there was a suggestion of effaced brightness, as of a painting which had once been sharply outlined and brilliant but was now rubbed into a formless, impressionist study of shadows and undefined, yellow blurs. The golden halos of lamps blotted the dark at intervals, and now and then the figures, which had occupied the benches, passed into the circles of vaporous illumination, and passed out of them, as if they had been crossing the stage of a theater.
Berny did not move and did not notice the increasing chill of the hour or the moisture beading on her clothes like wintry rime. She was sunk in an abyss of thought, a suspended trance of contemplation, of receptivity to new ideas. In one hour her basic estimate of human nature, her accepted measurement of motives and standards, had been suddenly upset. Her point of view was like a kaleidoscope, which is unexpectedly turned. Sitting motionless on the bench she saw the familiar aspect of life fallen into new shapes, taking on alien forms.
She realized that Dominick had never been happy with her, and, for the first time, she understood the gulf between them. She saw what the life was that he had wanted to lead, and that he could have led with the other woman. It would have been that very form of existence which Berny had always derided, and thought an outward expression of the inward dullness of people who had children, looked shabby, and did not care for money. Now she felt unsure as to whether her scorn of it was not foolish and unenlightened. As in a sudden forward shoot of a search-light, she saw them—Dominick and Rose—happy in a way she had never dreamed of being happy, in a world so far from hers that she had never before had a clear look at it, a man and woman concentrated upon the piece of life that belonged to them, living passionately for each other, indifferent to all that seemed to her of value.