Berny

“ Her form detached itself gradually from the fog, the effect of deliberation being due to the fact that she was dressed in gray, a long, loose coat and a round hat with a film of veil about it. She would have been a study in monochrome but for the color in the cheek turned to Berny, a glowing, rose-tinted cheek into which the damp had called a pink brighter than any rouge. Berny looked at it with reluctant admiration, and the woman turned and presented her full face, blooming as a flower, to the watcher’s eye. ”

“ Two days after this momentous combination of her enemies, Berny was sitting in the parlor of her flat, writing a letter. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and she had just dressed herself for her daily jaunt down town, where she spent an hour or two looking into the shop windows, pricing articles of apparel, taking a glass of soda water, and stopping for chats with acquaintances under awnings and in open doorways. Her life was exceedingly barren of occupation and companionship. When she had married, she had dropped all work save such as seemed to her fitting for the wife of a rich man. ”

“ Berny heard him laugh and knew by the tone of his voice that he was pretending and was not really amused. She had nothing particular to say to him, feeling that she had accomplished enough in inducing him to join them, and, sitting forward on the edge of her chair, continued to watch the people. A blonde coiffure some rows in front caught her eye and she was studying its intricacies through the interstices that came and went between the moving heads, when the sudden emergence into view of an unusually striking female figure diverted her attention. ”

“ Berny felt dizzy. As her rancor had seemed slipping from her in the earlier part of the interview, now she felt as if her resolution was suddenly melting. She was confused between the strangling up-rush of greed and the passion that once again rose in her against the old man, who showed such a bold determination to sweep her from his daughter’s path. She was no longer mistress of herself. Inward excitement, the unfamiliar struggle with temptation, had upset and unnerved her. ”

“ Berny was extremely unsettled. She had never been in such a condition of worry and indecision. She was at once depressed and elated, triumphant and cast down, all in a bubble of excitement and uncertainty. A combination of violent feelings, hostile to one another, had possession of her and used her as a battle-ground for shattering encounters.
She loved money with the full power of her nature—it was her strongest, her predominating passion—and now for the first time in her life it was within her grasp. ”

“ Ryan alighting from the carriage, was suddenly a factor of paramount importance in the struggle between the two. So small a matter as a nod of the elder woman’s head would have made the younger woman more pliable, more tractable and easily managed, than almost any other action on her mother-in-law’s part. Berny, bowed to, would have been a more docile, reasonable person than either Mrs. Ryan or Bill Cannon had had yet to deal with; while Berny, cut, flamed up into a blaze of mutinous fury that, had they known it, would have planted dismay in the breasts of those bold conspirators. ”

“ Standing almost if not quite alone, in contrast with these failures of the past, THE CROSS OF BERNY is the more remarkable; and has achieved the success not merely of being the simply harmonious joint work of four individual minds,—but of being in itself, and entirely aside from its interest as a literary curiosity, a great book. ”

“ It was certainly not an enthusiastic greeting. A sensitive woman would have been shriveled by it, but Berny was not sensitive. She had realized from the start that she would probably have to combat the lingering surliness left by the quarrel. As Dominick ascended, her air of smiling welcome was marked by a bland cheery unconsciousness of any past unpleasantness. She was not, however, as unconscious as she looked. She noted his heaviness of demeanor, the tired expression of his lifted face. ”

“ For a moment they both sat silent, listening, the actor with his face looking sharp and pale in the suspense of the moment, the muscles of his lean cheeks working. The rustle of Berny’s dress sounded from the stairway and grew in volume as she slowly ascended. The two men rose to their feet.
“Come in the den for a moment, Berny,” [463] Dominick called. “There’s a gentleman here who wants to see you.”
The rustle advanced up the hall, and the portière was drawn back. Bernice, brilliantly dressed, a mauve orchid pinned on her bosom, stood in the aperture, smiling. ”

“ There’s nothing much to bother about. Good night, Berny,” and he stepped back into the room and shut the door.
Berny sat as he had left her for a space, and then drew back upon the divan and leaned against the mound of pillows. She made the movement charily and slowly, her face set in a rigidity of [190] thought to which her body seemed fixed and obedient. She sat thus for an hour without moving, her eyes staring before her, two straight lines folded in the skin between her brows. ”

“ Sitting motionless on the bench she saw the familiar aspect of life fallen into new shapes, taking on alien forms.
She realized that Dominick had never been happy with her, and, for the first time, she understood the gulf between them. She saw what the life was that he had wanted to lead, and that he could have led with the other woman. It would have been that very form of existence which Berny had always derided, and thought an outward expression of the inward dullness of people who had children, looked shabby, and did not care for money. ”

“ She relaxed from her alert sprightliness of pose, and sank against the back of the seat in the limpness of unobserved indifference. Sitting thus, her eyes on the ground, she heard, at first unheeding, [400] then with a growing sense of attention, footsteps approaching on the gravel walk. They were the short, quick footsteps of a woman. Berny looked up and saw the woman, a little darker than the atmosphere, emerging from the surrounding grayness, as if she were slowly rising to the surface through water. ”

“ He backed toward the chair, pulling it out into the unencumbered space in the middle of the floor, his movements deliberate and full of design, as if he felt comfortably at home. Subsiding into the seat, which had arms and was rather cramped for his large bulk, he laid his hat among the knick-knacks of a near-by table and said smilingly,
“Now, let me make my apologies for coming. In the first place, I’m an old man. We’ve got a few privileges to compensate us for the loss of so much that’s good. Don’t you think that’s fair, Mrs. Ryan?”
Berny liked him. ”

“ Berny was not glad of the quarrel, but it seemed a wonderful piece of luck that that unpleasant episode should have sent him into the very arms of the man that she had always wanted him to cultivate and who was the best person in the world for him to impress favorably. If Bill Cannon, who had been a friend of his father’s, took a fancy to Dominick, there was no knowing what might happen. In a sudden reaction of relief and hope Berny saw them almost adopted children of the Bonanza King, flouting the Ryans in the pride of their new-found honors. ”

“ Now he had been defied in his stronghold and by the sort of person that he looked upon as a worm in the path—the kind of worm a man did not even tread on but simply brushed aside. It was incredible in its audacity, its bold insolence. As he walked down Montgomery Street to the car, he pondered on Berny, wonderingly and with a sort of begrudging, astonished admission of a [377] courage that he could not but admire. What a nerve the woman had to dare to threaten him! To threaten Bill Cannon! ”

“ A sound escaped her, a sound of pain, as if forced from her by the grinding of jealous passions within. She dropped the curtain and rose to her feet. If they married it would be always that way with them. They would have everything in the world, everything that to Berny made life worth while. Even Paris, with [396] her three hundred thousand dollars to open all its doors, would be a savorless place to her if Rose and Dominick were to be left to the enjoyment of all the pleasures and luxuries of life back in California. ”

“ Con Ryan. Berny wheeled about just as the exceedingly smart victoria of Mrs. Cornelius Ryan drew up at the curb and that august matron prepared to descend from it. In these afternoon shopping excursions she had often met her mother-in-law, often met her and invariably seen her turn her head and fix her eyes in the opposite direction. ”

“ Berny’s indifferent glance became bright and fixed under the steadying effect of sudden interest.
“Been in the Klondike?” she repeated. “What was his name?”
“Buford, James Defay Buford. He’d been an actor at the opera house at Dawson.”
“Buford,” said Berny, turning to place a helping of pease on the plate the Chinaman held toward her. “I never heard of him. I thought perhaps it might have been some actor I’d seen play. I’d like to know an actor in private life. They must be so different.” ”

“ In the dead watches of the night, Berny had asked herself this question, and found no answer to it. She tried to laugh again, but it was harder and less mirthful than before.
The old man leaned forward, shaking an admonitory forefinger at her.
“Don’t you know, young woman, that’s a pretty wearing situation? Don’t you know to live in a state of perpetual strife will break down the strongest spirit? The dropping of water will wear away a stone. You can’t stand the state of siege and warfare you’ve got yourself into much longer. Your rage is carrying you along now. ”

“ 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 [492] reflections from glazed woodwork and the surfaces of mirrors, she looked less haggard, calmer and steadier, than she had looked for many weeks. ”

“ She did not turn, and he continued:
“You’re asking people to this ball that you hardly know. Everybody in San Francisco’s going. What harm has Berny done that you should leave her out this way?”
“I don’t want women with that kind of record in my house. I don’t ask decent people here to meet that sort,” said his mother over her shoulder. ”

“ Berny regarded women who had children as fools, and the children grouped about these mothers of her own age—three and four sometimes, with the husband carrying a baby—were to her only annoying, burdensome creatures that made the party seem a little ridiculous, and had not half the impressiveness or style of her elegant costume and lilac frills. ”

“ It was another woman’s wanting Dominick that made Berny more determined to cling to him than if he had been the Prince Charming of her dreams. She carried about with her a continual feeling of self-congratulation that she had discovered the full significance of the plot in time. Her attitude was that of the quarreling husband and wife who fight furiously for the possession of a child for which neither cares. To herself she kept saying, “They want my husband, do they? Well, I’ll take mighty good care, no matter how much they want him and he wants to go, they don’t get him.” ”

“ The man from New York was a fiction. She—that immaculate, perfect girl—had invented him. Dominick could not invent anything. He was not that kind of man. But Berny knew that all women can lie when the occasion demands, and Rose Cannon could thus supply her lover’s deficiencies.
With her blankly-staring eyes fixed on the white outside world, her mental vision conjured up a picture of them at dinner that night, sitting opposite each other at a table glistening with the richest of glass and silver, while soft-footed menials waited obsequiously upon them. Bill Cannon was not in the picture. ”

“ Neither listener could for a moment speak; then Hannah said with a solemnity full of dignity,
“I can’t believe that, Berny.”
“You needn’t if you don’t want to,” returned Berny, still not looking up. “If you like to keep on believing lies, it’s all the same to me. But I guess I know more about Dominick Ryan, and what he feels, than you do, and I tell you he doesn’t care a hang for me. He gave up caring”—she paused, a memory of the ball, the quarrel, and the fatal visit to Antelope flashing through her mind—“over a year ago. ”

“ Every seat in the lines of benches was full and foot passengers kept constantly coming up, standing for a few measures, [226] and then moving on. They were of all kinds. The beauty of the day had even tempted the more fashionable element out, and the two sisters saw many elegantly-dressed ladies of the sort on whom Hazel fitted hats all day, and that evoked in Berny a deep and respectful curiosity. Both women, sitting high in their chairs, craned their necks this way and that, spying through breaks in the crowd, and following attractive figures with dodging movements of their heads. ”

“ It was the instinct of an old warrior who loves the fray.
Berny, on her side, knew him at the first glance, and her sensations were those of disturbance and uneasiness. She remembered him to be a friend of the Ryans’, and she had arrived at the stage when any friend of the Ryans’ was an enemy of hers. She was instantly in arms and on the defensive. Rose had not yet taken shape in her mind as a new, menacing force conniving against her. Besides, she had no idea that Rose reciprocated the sentiment that Dominick cherished for her. ”