A Man's Hearth Part 10

"If you may love me, and I want you, we have enough to start with," he gently insisted. "I promise you I'll do my part. Will you try it with me?"

She remained still. But the long pause, the contact between them, joined with the change in the man and helped him.

"Will you marry me to-night?" he pressed.

She drew away from him with a flare of her natural resolution.

"No! Not to-night, if you could!"

"To-morrow, then?"

"Go home," she bade him. "Go home; think of everything--of what you have and what you would leave, of all you want and must miss. _Think._ And if, to-morrow----"

"Yes?"

"If you are sure, come back. I----may try it."

He knew better than to force her further.

"To-morrow, then, I will meet you at noon, in the pavilion," he yielded, quietly, in spite of his leaping excitement. "And there is something else. Once I bought these, for you. Of course I dared not give them to you, afterward. But I did not throw them away, and I brought them in my pocket to-night. Perhaps you will wear them to-morrow, when we go away."

The storm swooped down again. This time he did not hold her from the gust, and she flitted with it into the darkness. But she took the little package he had pressed into her hands; she had at last the little pair of buckled shoes.

CHAPTER VII

THE DARING ADVENTURE

They were married at two o'clock the next day. The wedding was in church, at Elsie Murray's desire. With a certain defiance expressive of his att.i.tude toward all the world, Adriance, after obtaining their license, took her to the rector of that costly and fashion-approved cathedral which the Adriances graced with their membership and occasional attendance. Of course the two were met with astonishment, but there was a decision in the young man's speech and bearing that forbade interference. The clergyman did not find the familiar, easy, good-natured Tony Adriance in the man who curtly silenced delicate allusion to the wedding's unexpectedness and the surprising absence of Mr. Adriance, senior.

"I am over age, and so is Miss Murray," was the brief statement, whose finality ended comment. "Will you be good enough not to delay us; we are leaving town?"

There were no more objections. Of course the bride was not recognized as Mrs. Masterson's nurse; she simply was an unknown girl. And she did not in any way suggest that Mr. Adriance was marrying out of his world.

Adriance himself entirely approved of her in this new role. He liked her dark-blue suit with its relieving white at throat and wrists, and her small hat with a modest white quill at just the right angle. And she wore the shining, Spanish-heeled, small shoes of his choosing. He noticed how large her gray eyes were, when she lifted them to his, large, and clear as pure water is clear under a still, gray sky. But her heavy lashes threw shadows across them, as he had once seen lines of shadow lie across a little lake in Maine on an autumn day. He wondered if she was happy, or frightened. He could not tell what she was thinking or feeling.

So they were married before the imposing altar of cream-hued marble, and the conventional notice went to the newspapers:

Adriance-Murray. Elsie Galvez Murray to Anthony Adriance, Jr., by the Rev. Dr. Van Huyden, at St. Dunstan's Cathedral.

It was very simply done, for so daring an adventure.

When they stood outside, in the sparkling autumn sunshine, Elsie Adriance asked her first question.

"Where are we going?" she wondered, in her soft, blurred speech that now Adriance recognized as of the South. Her middle name had caught his attention also. There once had been a governor of Louisiana called Galvez; New Orleans has a street named for him.

But he was not thinking of ancestry now. He looked doubtfully at his companion. In spite of his repressed bearing, he was suffering a terrible excitement and a tearing conflict of will and desire. He was acutely conscious of the finality of what had been done; and one part of him wished it undone. He thought of his father and Lucille as a man in a fever thinks; glimpsing them in a confusion of remembered pictures, conceiving their future att.i.tude with the exaggeration of his unreasoning sense of guilt and belated regret. He felt himself in bonds, and the instinct of escape gripped and shook him. But he kept himself in hand.

"Where do you wish to go?" he temporized, withholding his own wish. It became him to consider her first, now and hereafter.

She shook her head.

"I follow you," she reminded him, quite simply and gravely. "Where would--it be easiest for you? You spoke of going out of town; perhaps that would be best. I think, it seems to me, that we should start as we mean to go on."

"Yes!" he exclaimed eagerly. She had offered him his inmost desire; in his grat.i.tude he caught her hand, stammering in the rush of words released. "Yes. If you will go, I have a house--our house. Let me tell you. Yesterday, after meeting you at Masterson's the night before, I was at the limit. I had to keep out of doors and keep moving, or go to pieces. I kept seeing Fred, and Holly. Well, I took a long drive; across the river, I went, perhaps because you were always looking over there as if it were some kind of a fairyland. And on the way back, on the road along the Palisades, I saw the house. It was--I stopped and went in. It looked like a place you had made a picture of. I can't explain what I mean, but I sat down there and thought things out. You won't be angry?

I bought it. Not that I was so sure of you! You see, if you refused to take me, I knew I had money enough to buy fifty like it for a whim. And if you would come, it was the house."

There was no anger in her glance, only a heartening comprehension and cordial willingness.

"Let us go there," she agreed. "I should like that best of all."

Reanimated, he put her into the waiting taxicab, gave the chauffeur his directions, and closed the door upon their first wedded solitude.

"But this is one of the things we must not do," she told him, bringing the relief of humor to the situation. "We must not take taxis and let them wait for us with a price on the head of each moment. It is more than extravagant; it is reckless."

He laughed out, surprised.

"So it is. I am afraid you will have a lot to teach me."

"Yes," she a.s.sumed the burden. "Yes."

They rode down to the ferry, and the taxicab rolled on board the broad, unsavory-smelling boat. When the craft started, the vibration of the engine sent a throbbing sense of departure through Adriance such as he never had felt in starting a European voyage. This time he could not return. He was humbly grateful for Elsie's silence, which permitted his own.

On the Jersey side their cab slowly moved through the dark ferry house, then plunged out into a sun-drenched world and swung blithely up to the long Edgewater hill. They left the river shipping behind, presently. The sunlight glittered through the woods that still clothe the long, rampart-like stretches along the summit of the great cliffs; a forest of jewels like the subterranean woods of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, only instead of silver and diamonds these trees displayed the red of cornelian and brown of topaz all set in copper and bronze. The storm of the night before had littered the ground with the spoils of Lady Autumn's jewel-box; the air was spicily sweet and very clear.

The village on the first slope of the hills had been dingy and poor.

Here above, on the heights winding up the river, there were few houses, with long s.p.a.ces between. Elsie leaned at the window, her wide eyes embracing all. Adriance leaned back, seeing nothing.

The taxicab finally stopped, nevertheless, at his signal, before a little red cottage set far back from the road.

"Here?" the chauffeur queried, with incredulous scorn.

"Here," Adriance affirmed, swinging out their two suit-cases and his wife. He laughed a little at the man's face. "How much?"

The toll pointed Elsie's warning. She made a grimace at her pupil. His spirits mounting again, Adriance answered the rebuke by catching her hand to lead her up the absurd, staggering Gothic porch in miniature.

"I'll come back for the baggage," he promised. "Come look, first."

"Is there anything inside?"

"Oh, yes. I----" he looked askance at her. "I bought things, at a shop in Fort Lee, early this morning. I suppose they're all wrong."

She met his diffidence with a smile so warm, so enchanting in its sweet, maternal raillery and indulgence that his heart melted within him. And then, as he fumbled with the key, she took from her hand-bag a book and a small gla.s.s bottle, and gave them to him.

"What----?" he marvelled.

"Don't you know?" she wondered at him. "'Where was you done raised, man?' Don't you know there is no luck in the house unless the first things carried into it are the Bible and the salt?"