Three days after the return of the Cannons, Dominick Ryan also came home. He had answered Berny’s letter the day the Cannons left, a few hours after that interview with the Bonanza King, in which, driven to bay by the old man’s questions, he had torn the veil from his married life.
After that there was a period of several hours when he sat in his room thinking over what had happened. It seemed to him that he had played a dastardly part. He saw himself a creature of monumental, gross selfishness, who had cajoled a young girl, in a moment of softness and sentiment, into an action which had done nothing but distress and humiliate her. He, who should have been the strong one, had been weak. It was he who should have seen how things were going; he, the married man, who had allowed himself to feel and to yield to a love that ought to have been hidden for ever in his own heart.
He felt that it would be a sort of expiation to go back to his wife. That was where he belonged. Rose must never again cross his path, have a place in his thoughts, or float, a soft beguiling image, in his memory. He had a wife. No matter what Berny was, she was the woman he had married. She had not deceived him. It was he who had done her a wrong, and he owed her a reparation.
In his raw state, his nerves still thrilling with the memory of that moment’s embrace, he saw Berny from her own point of view. He lost the memory of the complacent mistress in the picture of the unloved wife, on whose side there was much to be said. Morbidness colored his vision and exaggerated his sense of culpability. If she had an ugly temper, had it not been excited, fed and aggravated by the treatment she had received from his family? If they had maintained a different attitude toward her, the poor girl might have been quite a pleasant, easy-going person. In all other ways she had been a good wife. Since their marriage, no other man had ever won a glance from her. She had often enough assured Dominick of that fact, and he, for his part, knew it to be true. She had struggled to keep a comfortable home on their small income. If she was not congenial to him—if her companionship was growing daily more disagreeable—was it all her fault? He had known her well before he married her, six months of the closest intimacy had made him acquainted with every foible of her character. It was no story of a youth beguiled and deceived by a mature woman in the unequal duel of a drawing-room courtship.
Her letter intensified his condition of self-accusation, chafed and irritated his soreness of shame till it became a weight of guilt. It also stirred afresh the pity, which was the strongest feeling he had for her. It was the tenderest, the most womanly letter, Berny had ever written him. A note of real appeal sounded through it. She had humiliated herself, asked his pardon, besought of him to return. As he thought of it, the vision of her alone in the flat, bereft of friends, dully devoid of any occupation, scornful of her old companions, fawningly desirous of making new ones who refused to know her, smote him with an almost sickening sense of its pitifulness. He felt sorry for her not alone because of her position, but because of what she was, what her own disposition had made her. She would never change, her limitations were fixed. She would go on longing for the same flesh-pots to the end, believing that they represented the highest and best.
Berny had realized that her letter was a skilful and moving production, but she did not know that it was to gain a hundredfold in persuasive power by falling on a guilty conscience. It put an end to Dominick’s revolt, it quenched the last sparks of the mutinous rage which had taken him to Antelope. That same afternoon in his frigid bedroom at the hotel, he answered it. His reply was short, only a few lines. In these he stated that he would be back on the following Saturday, the tenderness of his injured foot making an earlier move impossible.
The letter reached Berny Friday and threw her into a state of febrile excitement. Her deadly dread of Dominick’s returning to his family had never quite died out. It kept recurring, sweeping in upon her in moods of depression, and making her feel chilled and frightened. Now she knew he was coming back to her, evidently not lovingly disposed—the letter was too terse and cold for that—but, at any rate, he was coming home. Once there, she would set all her wits to work, use every art of which she was mistress, to make him forget the quarrel and enter in upon a new era of sweet reasonableness and mutual consideration.
She set about this by cleaning the house and buying new curtains for the sitting-room. Such purifications and garnishments would have agreeably impressed her on a home-coming and she thought they would Dominick. In the past year she had become much more extravagant than she had been formerly, a characteristic which had arisen in her from a state of rasped irritation against the restricted means to which Mrs. Ryan’s rancor condemned her. She was quite heavily in debt to various tradespeople; and to dressmakers and milliners she owed sums that would have astounded her husband had he known of them. This did not prevent her from still further celebrating his return by ordering a new dress in which to greet him and a new hat to wear the first time they went out together. How she was to pay for these adornments, she did not know nor care. The occasion was so important that it excused any extravagance, and Berny, in whose pinched, dry nature love of dress was a predominant passion, was glad to have a reason for adding new glories to her wardrobe.
On the Saturday morning she went out betimes. Inquiry at the railway office told her that the train which connected with the branch line to Rocky Bar did not reach the city till six in the evening. She ordered a dinner of the choicest viands and spent part of the morning passing from stall to stall in the market on Powell Street spying about for dainties that might add a last elaborating touch to the lengthy menu. The afternoon was dedicated to the solemn rites of massaging, manicuring, and hair-waving at a beauty doctor’s. On an ordinary occasion these unwonted exertions in the pursuit of good looks would have tired her, but to-day she was keyed to a pitch where she did not notice small outside discomforts.
Long before six she was dressed, and standing before the mirror in her room she laid on the last perfecting touches with a short stick of hard red substance and a circular piece of mossy-looking white stuff, which she rubbed with a rotary motion round and round her face. Her new dress of raspberry pink crape betrayed the hand of an expert in its gracefully-falling folds and the elegance with which it outlined her slim, long-waisted shape. Her artificially-reddened hair waved back from her forehead in glossy ripples; her face, all lines and hollows rubbed from it, looked fresh and youthful. With the subdued light falling on her through the silk and paper lamp shades, she looked a very pretty woman, the darkness of her long brilliant eyes thrown into higher relief by the whiteness of her powdered face.