A Man's Hearth Part 2

The girl turned to him with candid relief warming her surprise.

"Oh!" she exclaimed her recognition. "You are very good. I am afraid, really afraid it will have to be both. _Oh_----!"

Holly had deliberately lunged forward and clutched a double handful of the alluring wares.

By the time calm was re-established and the amused Adriance had paid, it seemed altogether natural that he should take his place on the seat beside the girl; as natural as the pedler's placid departure. Holly lay back on his cushions in vast content, two balloons floating from their tethers at the foot of his coach and a pinwheel clasped in his hand.

"I should like to say that he is not often like this," remarked the girl, gathering together her scattered sewing, "But he likes having his own way as much as Mait' Raoul Galvez; and everyone knows what _he_ raised."

"I don't," Adriance confessed. He noticed for the first time a softening of her words, not enough to be called an accent, far less a lisp, but yet a trick of speech, unfamiliar to him. "What did he raise?"

"Satan," she gravely told him. "Mait' Raoul knew more about voodooism and black magic than any white man ever should. It is said he vowed that he would have the devil up in person to play cards with him, or never be content on earth or under it. And he did, although he knew well enough Satan never gambles except for souls."

"Who won?"

"Satan did. Yet he lost again, for Mait' Raoul tricked him in the contract so cleverly that it did not bind and the soul was free. There is a great split rock near Galvez Bayou where they say the demon stamped in his rage so fiercely the stone burst."

"Then Maitre Raoul escaped Hades, after all?"

"Oh, no! He went there, but merely as a point of honor. He was a gambler, but he always paid his losses."

Adriance laughed, yet winced a little, too. A baffled, helpless bitterness darkened across his expression, as it had done on the evening of their first meeting. He looked down at the pavement as if in fear of accidentally encountering his companion's clear glance.

"I never read that story," he acknowledged. "Thank you."

"I fancy it never was written," she returned. "There is a song about it; a sleepy, creepy song which should never be sung between midnight and dawn."

He watched her draw the thread in and out, for a s.p.a.ce. She was embroidering an intricate monogram in the centre of a square of fine linen, working with nice exact.i.tude and daintiness.

"What is it?" he wondered, finally.

Her glance traced the direction of his.

"A net for goldfish," she replied.

It was not until long afterward he understood she had told him that she sold her work.

The river glittered, breaking into creamy furrows of foam under the ploughing traffic. The sunshine was warm and sank through Adriance with a lulling sense of physical pleasure and tranquil laziness. How bright and clean a world he seemed to view, seated here! He felt a pang of longing, keen as pain, when he thought that he might have had such content as this as an abiding state, instead of a brief respite. How had he come to shut himself away from peace, all unaware? How was it that he never had valued the colorless blessing, until it was lost?

After a while he fell to envying Maitre Raoul, who had gone to the devil honorably.

A long sigh from Holly, slumbering amid his trophies, awoke Adriance to realization that his companion possessed the gift of being silent gracefully. He had not spoken to her for quite half an hour, yet she appeared neither bored nor offended, but as if she had been engaged in following out some pleasant theme of meditation. A sparrow tilted and preened itself on the rail, not a yard from her bent, dark head. Over at the curbstone, the boy who guarded Adriance's horse had slipped the bridle over one arm and was playing marbles with two cheerful comrades who made calculated allowances for his handicap, based on his coming reward from the rider.

"I am afraid I am very dull," Adriance presently offered vague apology.

"Are you?"

"I mean, I am not entertaining."

She lifted her eyes from her sewing to regard him with delicate raillery.

"No. If you had been the entertaining sort of person, I could never have let you talk to me," she said. "But I think you had better go, please, now. Two imported nursemaids in bat-wing cloaks have been glowering at us for some time as it is. Holly and I shall be grateful to you a thousand years for this morning's rescue."

He rose reluctantly, with a feeling of being ejected from the only serene spot on earth.

"Thank you for letting me stay," he answered. "You are very kind. I----"

His lowered glance had encountered her little feet, demurely crossed under the edge of her sober skirt. They were very small, serious shoes indeed; not a touch of the day's capricious fancy in decoration relieved them. But what struck to the man's heart was their brave blackness, the blackness of polish that could not quite conceal that they had been mended. Of course, he at once looked away, but the impression remained.

"I hope Holly will not imitate Mait' Raoul any more," he finished lamely.

The girl frankly turned to watch him ride away. Her natural interest seemed to the man more modest than any pose of indifference.

But it seemed that she was appointed by Chance to make Tony Adriance dissatisfied and restive. It was altogether absurd, but the fanciful legend she had told him taunted and hunted his sullen thoughts. He took it with him to his home, when he changed into suitable attire to keep a luncheon engagement with Mrs. Masterson. It still accompanied him when he entered the great apartment house where the Mastersons lived.

He had not wanted to act as Lucille Masterson's escort on this occasion.

His attendance had been skilfully compelled. But now he hated the duty so much that he was dangerously near rebellion. He hesitated on the threshold of the building, half inclined not to enter; to go, instead, to a telephone and excuse himself for desertion on some pretext.

It was too late. Already the door was held open for him by a footman whose discreetly familiar smile Adriance saw, and resented. He winced again when the elevator boy stopped at the Mastersons' floor without being told, implying the impossibility of Mr. Adriance's call being intended for any other household. He never had noticed these things before; now, he felt himself disgracefully exposed before these black men.

He was altogether in a mood of bitter exasperation, when he was ushered into Mrs. Masterson's little drawing-room. He recognized this condition with a vague sense of surprise at himself underlying the dominant emotion. All his life he had been singularly even-tempered. Now he combated a wish to say ugly, caustic things to the woman who had brought him here. He did not want to see her.

Yet she was very pleasant to see. Indeed, both the scene and his hostess were charming, as they met his view. Mrs. Masterson was standing before a long mirror, surveying herself, so that Adriance saw her twice; once in fact, and once as a reflection. Sunlight filled the room, which was furnished and draped in a curious shade of deep blue with a shimmering richness of color, so that the lady's gray-clad figure stood out in clear and precise detail. But Mrs. Masterson could bear that strong light, and knew it. Without turning, she smiled into the mirror toward the man whose image she saw there.

"How do you like the last Viennese fancy, Tony?" she composedly greeted him.

Her voice was not one of her good points. It was naturally too high-pitched and harsh, and although by careful training she had accustomed herself to speak with a suppressed evenness of tone that smothered the defect to most ears, there resulted a lack of expression or modulation perilously near monotony. Adriance listened now, with a fresh sense of irritation, to the fault he only had observed recently.

Before answering, he surveyed critically the decided lines of the costume offered for his approval; its audacious little waistcoat of cerise-and-black checked velvet, the diminutive hat that seemed to have alighted like a b.u.t.terfly on the shining yellow hair brushed smoothly back from Mrs. Masterson's pink ears, and the high-b.u.t.toned gray boots with a silk ta.s.sel pendant at each ankle. Those exquisite and costly boots taunted him with their sharp contrast to those he had studied an hour before; they spurred him on to rudeness as if actual rowels were affixed to their little French heels.

"The skirt is too extreme," he stated perversely.

"They are going to be so; this is quite a bit in advance," she returned.

"Do you like it?"

"Not so well! It makes a woman look like a child; except for her face."

Lucille Masterson's tact was often at fault from her lack of humor.

Instead of retorting with laughter or silence, she opposed offence to his wilfulness.

"Thank you," she answered freezingly. "I seem to have aged rather suddenly."

"You know well enough how handsome you are," he said, a trifle ashamed.

"Of course I did not mean what you imply. But, after all, we are not children, Lucille, either of us. We are a man and a woman who are going----"

"Well?"

"To gather a rather nasty apple!" He forced a smile to temper the statement.

She slowly turned around and regarded him.