The information seemed to startle every one. The men crowded from the doorway and balcony into the street. McVeigh set down the bags, and, turning his weather-beaten face to the sky, uttered a smothered ejaculation of a profane character. Cannon came forward to where his daughter stood and looked into the blackness beyond. The girl had drawn off her glove and held her bare hand out, then stepping back to the light of the window, she showed it to her father. The white skin was sprinkled with snow crystals.
“Sure enough,” he said in a thoughtful voice. “Well, it won’t be the first time I’ve been snowed up at Antelope.”
CHAPTER II
A YOUNG MAN MARRIED
That same evening, at the hour when Bill Cannon and his daughter were setting out from Rocky Bar, Dominick Ryan was walking up Van Ness Avenue toward his mother’s house.
Dominick did not know at what hours balls of the kind Mrs. Ryan was giving that evening were supposed to begin. It was nearly three years since he had been a participant in such festal gatherings. He had not been at a dance, or a dinner, or a theater party since his marriage. He had heard that these “functions,” as people now called them, began later than they did in his day. Stopping by a lamp he drew out his watch—ten o’clock. It was later than he expected. In truth, as he had seen the house looming massively from its less imposing neighbors, his foot had lagged, his approach had grown slower and slower. It was his mother’s home, once his own, and as he drew nearer to it his reluctance to enter grew stronger, more overpoweringly oppressive.
In the clear, lamp-dotted night it looked much larger and more splendid than by day. When Cornelius Ryan had built it he had wanted to have the finest house in San Francisco, and he certainly had achieved the most spacious and ornate. Its florid ornamentation was now hidden by the beautifying dark, and on its vast façade numerous windows broke the blackness with squares of light. In the lower ones the curtains were drawn, but slivers and cracks of radiance slipped out and penetrated the dusk of a garden, where they encountered the glossy surfaces of leaves and struck into whispering darknesses of shrubbery.
The stimulating unquiet of festival was in the air. Round the mouth of the canvas tunnel that stretched from the door a dingy crowd was assembled, staring in at nothing more inspiring than the blank visage of the closed portal. At every passing footstep each face turned to the street, hopefully expectant of the first guest. The whining of catgut strings, swept by tentative bows, struck on Dominick’s ear as he pushed his way through the throng and passed up the tunnel. Before he touched the bell the door swung back and a man-servant he had never seen before murmured in politely low tones,
“Gentlemen’s dressing-room first floor to the right.”
Dominick stood uncertain. He was only a rare, occasional visitor at his mother’s house, and to-night the hall stripped for revelry looked strangely unfamiliar. The unexpectedness of a great, new mirror, surmounted by gold heraldic devices, confused him. The hall chairs were different. The music, loud now and beginning to develop from broken chords and phrases into the languorous rhythm of a waltz measure, came from behind a grove of palms that stood back under the stairs, where the organ was built into the wall. Both to the right and left, wide, unencumbered rooms opened, brilliantly lighted, with flowers banked in masses on the mantels and in the corners. The scent of these blossoms was rich on the air and seemed to blend naturally—like another expression of the same sensuous delightfulness—with the dreamy sweetness of the music.
“Gentlemen’s dressing-room first floor to the right,” repeated the servant, and Dominick became aware of the man’s eyes, fixed on him with a gleam of uneasy scrutiny shining through cultivated obsequiousness.