“I’ve no doubt,” he said, “that young Mr. Ryan is an estimable gentleman, but he certainly appears to be possessed by a very impatient and ugly temper.”
Buford had found Miss Cannon one of the most amiable and charming ladies he had ever met, and it was therefore a good deal of a surprise to have her turn upon him a face of cold, reproving disagreement, and remark in a voice that matched it:
“I don’t agree with you at all, Mr. Buford, and you seem quite to forget that Mr. Ryan has been very sick and is still in great pain.”
Buford was exceedingly abashed. He would not have offended Miss Cannon for anything in the world, and it seemed to him that a being so compact of graciousness and consideration would be the first to censure an exhibition of ill-humor such as young Ryan had just made. He stammered an apologetic sentence and it did not add to his comfort to see that she was not entirely mollified by it and to feel that she exhaled a slight, disapproving coldness that put him at a great distance and made him feel mortified and ill at ease.
CHAPTER VIII
THE UNKNOWN EROS
The ten days that followed were among the most important of Dominick Ryan’s life. Looking back at them he wondered that he had been so blind to the transformation of his being which was taking place. Great emotional crises are often not any more recognized, by the individuals, than great transitional epochs are known by the nations experiencing them. Dominick did not realize that the most engrossing, compelling passion he had ever felt was slowly invading him. He did not argue that he was falling in love with a woman he could never own and of whom it was a sin to think. He did not argue or think about anything. He was as a vessel gradually filling with elemental forces, and like the vessel he was passive till some jar would shake it and the forces would run over. Meantime he was held by a determination, mutinous and unreasoning as the determination of a child, to live in the present. He had the feeling of the desert traveler who has found the oasis. The desert lay behind him, burning and sinister with the agony of his transit, and the desert lay before him with its horrors to be faced, but for the moment he could lie still and rest and forget by the fountain under the cool of the trees.
He did not consciously think of Rose. But if she were not there he was uneasy till she came again. His secret exhilaration at her approach, the dead blankness of his lack of her when she was absent, told him nothing. These were the feelings he had, and they filled him and left no cool residue of reason wherewith to watch and guard. He was taken unawares, so drearily confident of his allegiance to his particular private tragedy that he did not admit the possibility of a defection. A sense of rest was on him and he set it down—if he ever thought of it at all—to the relief of a temporary respite. Poor Dominick, with his inexperience of sweet things, did not argue that respite from pain should be a quiescent, contented condition of being, far removed from that state of secret, troubled gladness that thrilled him at the sound of a woman’s footstep.
No situation could have been invented better suited for the fostering of sentiment. His helpless state demanded her constant attention. The attitude of nurse to patient, the solicitude of the consoling woman for the disabled, suffering man, have been, since time immemorial, recognized aids to romance. Rose, if an unawakened woman, was enough of one to enjoy richly this maternal office of alternate cossetting and ruling one, who, in the natural order of things, should have stood alone in his strength, dictating the law. Perhaps the human female so delights in this particular opportunity for tyranny because it is one of her few chances for indulging her passion for authority.
Rose, if she did not quite revel in it, discreetly enjoyed her period of dominance. In the beginning Dominick had been not a man but a patient—about the same to her as the doll is to the little girl. Then when he began to get better, and the man rose, tingling with renewed life, from the ashes of the patient, she quickly fell back into the old position. With the inherited, dainty deceptiveness of generations of women, who, while they were virtuous, were also charming, she relinquished her dominion and retreated into that enfolded maidenly reserve and docility which we feel quite sure was the manner adopted by the ladies of the Stone Age when they felt it necessary to manage their lords.
She was as unconscious of all this as Dominick was of his growing absorption in her. If he was troubled she was not. The days saw her growing gayer, more blithe and light-hearted. She sang about the corridors, her smile grew more radiant, and every man in the hotel felt the power of her awakening womanhood. Her boyish frankness of demeanor was still undimmed by the first blurring breath of passion. If Dominick was not in the parlor her disappointment was as candid as a child’s whose mother has forgotten to bring home candy. All that she showed of consciousness was that when he was there and there was no disappointment, she concealed her satisfaction, wrapped herself in a sudden, shy quietness, as completely extinguishing of all beneath as a nun’s habit.