After dinner they went into the sitting-room, the sanctum with the ebonized cherry furniture where the family always retired when important matters were afoot. Here, side by side, they sat before the fireplace with the portrait of the late Cornelius Ryan looking benignly down on them. They did not talk much. The subject of the young man’s marriage had been thoroughly gone over in the afternoon. Later on, his mother would extract from him further particulars, till she would be as conversant with that miserable chapter of his life as if she had lived it herself.
To-night they were both in the quiescent state that follows turmoil and strife. They sat close together, staring into space, now and then dropping one of the short disconnected sentences that indicate a fused, understanding intimacy. The young man’s body was limp in his chair, his mind lulled in the restorative lethargy, the suspension of activities, that follows a struggle. His thoughts shrank shudderingly from the past, and did not seek to penetrate the future. He rested in a torpor of relief through which a dreamy sense of happiness came dimly, as if in the faintest, most delicate whispers.
His mother’s musings were definite and practical. She could now make that settlement, share and share alike, on both children that she had long desired—Cornelia’s would be a dowry on her wedding day and Dominick’s—well, Dominick had had hard times enough. She would go down to-morrow morning and see her lawyer about it.
At the same hour, in the house of the other rich man, the Bonanza King, having driven the servants from the room with violent words that did not indicate bad humor so much as high spirits, told his daughter the story. He told it shortly, hardly more than the main facts, and when it was concluded, forbore to make comments or, in fact, to look at her. It was a great deliverance, but he was not quite sure that his darling would experience the frank, unadulterated joy that had possessed both himself and Mrs. Ryan without restraining qualms. He did not know what to say to Rose. There were mysterious complexities in her character that made him decide to confine his statement to a recital of facts, eliminating those candid expressions of feeling which he could permit himself when talking to Mrs. Ryan or Berny.
As soon as he had told it all he rose from his chair as if ending the interview. His daughter rose too, pale and silent, and he put his arm round her shoulders and pressed her against his chest in a good-night hug. She kissed him and went up stairs to her own rooms, and he returned to his arm-chair at the end of the dining-table. Here, as was his wont, he sat smoking and pondering, turning over in his head the various aspects of the curious story and its unexpected outcome. Once, as the memory of Berny weeping into his handkerchief recurred to him, he stirred uneasily and muttered to himself,
“Why didn’t the damned fool stick out for the whole fifty thousand? I’d have given it to her as soon as not.”
Meantime the storm center, the focus round which the hopes and angers and fears of this little group had circled, was speeding eastward in the darkness of the early night. Berny sat in the corner of her section with her luggage piled high on the seat before her, a pillow behind her head. In the brightly clear light, intensified by reflections from glazed woodwork and the surfaces of mirrors, she looked less haggard, calmer and steadier, than she had looked for many weeks. Relief was at her heart. Now that she had turned her back on it she realized how she had hated it all—the flat, the isolation, the unsuccessful struggle, Dominick and his superior ways.
The excitement of change, the desire of the new, the unfamiliar, the untried, which had taken her far afield once before, sang in her blood and whispered its siren song in her ear. She had missed a fortune, but still she had something. She was not plunging penniless into the great outside world, and she pressed her hand against her chest where the thirty-five thousand dollars was sewed into the lining of her bodice. Thirty-five thousand dollars! It was a good deal if it wasn’t three hundred thousand.
As the train thundered on through the darkness she saw before her the lights of great cities, and heard the call of liberty, the call of the nomad and the social vagabond, the call of the noisy thoroughfare, of the bright places, of the tumult and the crowd. The roving passion of the wanderer, to whom the spell of home is faint as a whisper in the night, passed into her veins like the invigorating heat of wine. She exulted in the sense of her freedom, in the magic of adventure, in the wild independence of the unknown.
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