“Yes,” he said, looking away from her, “you’ve had one disappointment. That’s enough.”
“Disappointment!” she echoed in a loud voice. “Disappointment? I’ve lost my son; lost him as if he was dead—worse than if he was dead, for then I’d know he was happy and safe somewhere.”
It was a cry of pain, Rachel mourning for her child. The note of feeling in it checked the remark on Cannon’s lips. He understood what her suffering was and respected it.
“Why, Bill Cannon,” she went on, turning the perturbed fierceness of her face on him, “how often do you think I see my boy? What ties do you think he has with his home? He came up here after he’d got back from Antelope, but before that I’d only seen him once in six weeks.”
“That’s pretty hard,” he commented, his elbow on the arm of the chair, his chin sunk in the cup of his up-curled hand. “That’s pretty tough. I didn’t know it was as bad as that.”
“Nobody knows anything about him. He won’t let them. He won’t let me. He’s proud, and trying to hide it all. That’s the reason he comes up here so seldom. He knows I can see into him, see through him, clear through him, and he don’t want me to see how miserable he is.”
“Oh!” said the old man, moving slightly and raising his eyes to look at her. The interjection was full of significance, pregnant with understanding, appreciation and enlightenment. He was surprised himself. He had thought, and had understood from Dominick, that no one, especially no one of his own people, knew of the young man’s domestic infelicities. Neither of them was shrewd enough to realize that the mother would guess, would know by instinct.
“And what do you suppose he came up for that once?” pursued Mrs. Ryan. “You could guess a lot of times but you’d never strike it. He came up here the night of my ball to ask me to give him an invitation for his wife!”
She stared at her visitor with her face set in a stony hardness, a hardness reminiscent of that which had marked it when Dominick had asked for the invitation. Cannon saw it and checked the remark that rose to his lips. He was going to say “Why didn’t you give it to him?” and he saw that it was too light a comment for what had been a tragic occasion. All he did was to utter a grunt that might have meant anything and was consequently safe.
“That’s what his marriage has done for him, and that’s the state that woman has ground him down to. She’d worked on him till she’d got him to come up here and ask for it a few minutes before the people began to arrive! That’s what she made him do.”