A Man's Hearth Part 24

"I saw the way you live," Masterson repeated. "Yes. And you see the way I live. I'm no preacher, but measure them up and choose if ever you feel discontented, Tony. As for taking me home, neither of us could stand it.

I drink all day to keep myself merry enough to stand that restaurant, and take morphine at night to keep myself asleep. No, we will not talk about it. I must put this through in my own way, and then leave this part of the earth. I can drop all this at once when I am ready. I am no weakling physically."

The two wanted back to the car. Just before they reached it, Masterson closed the discussion.

"Think over what I've told you. You can't love your wife any more than I did Lucille." He shivered in the damp air, drawing his fur-lined coat closer about him. "I couldn't keep her, though I tried hard, at first.

Wish you better luck."

It was three o'clock in the morning when Adriance slipped his key into the clumsy old lock of his house-door, while Elsie perched herself on the railing of the porch. Within they heard his dog barking boisterous welcome.

"Up to work at seven," he commented, as the clock struck simultaneously with the opening of the door. But there was no complaint in his tone. He threw his arm around Elsie and drew her across the threshold with a deep breath of relief.

"Let me light the lamp," she offered.

"I'll light it." He held her closer. "Wait a moment; the hearth gives glow enough. I have been thinking--if it should be a boy, I would like to call our son after that jolly old ancestor of yours: the black-sloop man, Martin Galvez."

"Not Anthony?"

"No."

The brevity of the answer silenced her. She gave her consent more delicately than in words. But still Adriance did not move toward the lamp, or release his companion.

"Elsie, you are happy, aren't you?"

"More than happy, dear."

"If ever you are not, if you want anything you have not got, tell me.

You know I am not going to keep you in this poor place always, or let you work for me; I am working towards better things for you, now. I have not told you, yet--I was promoted to a new position to-day. I have work inside the factory, and some individuality. I am no longer just one of a troup of chauffeurs. And, of course, this is only a beginning. It is all for you, everything, will you remember? If ever--I'm often stupid and, well, a man!--if ever you find me lacking, you will tell me, won't you?"

She clasped her hands over the hand that held her. This ending to the day of doubt and anxiety closed her round with a hush of deep content.

She wanted to cry out her love and happiness and grat.i.tude for his tenderness, to exalt him above herself. But with a new wisdom, she did not. Where he had placed her, she stood.

"Yes," she a.s.sented. "Yes."

CHAPTER XVI

THE GUITAR OF ALENYA OF THE SEA

That one day, in a mood of fierce impatience, had seized upon Anthony Adriance and hurried him through a range of feeling and experience such as Time usually brings in leisurely sequence, s.p.a.ced apart. From Elsie's confidence in the morning, with its moving love and pride and awe he in nowise was afraid to name holy, he had gone to the spectacle of his friend's degradation in the tawdry restaurant. And as a completion, he had been confronted with the new and ugly vision of a father he could not honor.

He always had respected his father very sincerely, and felt more affection for him than either of them ever had realized. He had admired the success of the elder Adriance, and secretly regretted that he was not allowed to work with him or share it except by spending its proceeds. His hope of a reconciliation had not been all mercenary. Now all that was thrown down, an image overturned and shattered. He saw only a selfish, narrow-minded man, scheming to divorce a pretty woman from her husband in order that she might be free to come between his son and the unwelcome wife he had taken. For of course Elsie was judged by the servant's position she had held; there was no one to tell of her gentle birth and breeding. Anthony had understood this, and had looked forward with eager antic.i.p.ation to enlightening his father, some day when his other plans were quite ready.

He had meant that day to be soon; now he knew that it would never come in the way he had fancied. And the loss of an ideal hurt. Masterson had told him the truth; there was no escaping the logical inference to be drawn from it. Anthony wasted no energy in trying, instead addressing himself still more closely to the work in hand.

He worked harder than ever, at the mill, but the buoyant enthusiasm was gone. Now he dreaded the possibility that Mr. Goodwin might speak to Mr.

Adriance of the young man who bore his name and who was making such changes in the shipping department. For Anthony did not content himself with regulating the trucking system. He had inherited his father's ability, although the unused tool had lain undiscovered. His attention aroused, he found other slack lines, and indicated how to tighten them to taut efficiency. Mr. Goodwin visited the underground room more than once, observed and approved. Cook, won by the new man's tact that never slighted or criticised injuriously his former chief and present a.s.sociate, aided him with warm co-operation. Anthony found his salary increased. When Ransome returned, after his illness, he was given a new position, upstairs.

The evenings in the little red house were no longer entirely devoted to play, after that night spent abroad. Adriance took to keeping a book of records, in the form of cryptic notes and columns of figures.

"Chauffeur's accounts," he called them, when Elsie questioned; and she laughed acceptance of the evasion, forbearing to tease him with curiosity.

Long before, there had arrived the replies to the letters of announcement he and Elsie had written to her parents, and Adriance had been touched home by the serious, graciously cordial welcome extended to the unknown son-in-law. He had promised himself, and Elsie, that some time a visit to Louisiana should be paid. Since that, she had described the neighborhood, the countryside and people, with her knack of vivid word-sketching, until all lay as clearly before him as a place seen. Now he recalled this with a new consideration.

"Do you remember the old house and plantation that you once told me about?" he asked her, one Sunday morning. "The deserted place, that had been for sale so long. Do you suppose it is still for sale?"

"It was, the last time Virginia wrote," she replied, regarding him questioningly. "She spoke of a picnic held under the old trees."

"If I--well, was crowded out of here, would you be content to try life down there? I remembered yesterday that I own some rather valuable stuff left me by my mother; nothing very much, just jewelry she had as a girl.

I do not like the idea of selling it, but if I am forced into a corner, it would buy such a place for us. I have some ideas I would like to try out."

Elsie set down the salad-bowl with which she was busied; her rain-gray eyes grave, she considered her husband.

"Of what are you thinking, Anthony?"

Adriance looked away. Even to her, he could not bring himself to speak of his lost confidence in his father or to say whom he now feared as an enemy. Mr. Adriance could not divide Anthony and his wife without their consent, but he could make it bitterly hard for them to live together.

Anthony had known of men who had incurred his father's enmity, and the memory was not rea.s.suring. Before his interview with Masterson, he would have ridiculed the idea of such a situation between his father and himself; now, he was uncertain.

"Put on your hat and coat," he evaded the question. "Come for a walk; I want to show you something."

"And our dinner?" she demurred.

"Never mind it. We will eat scrambled eggs."

Laughing, she complied.

"What am I going to see, Anthony?"

"A house," briefly.

The walk took them quite away from the neighborhood of such small cottages as their own. In fact, the house before which Anthony finally halted was standing so much away from any others as scarcely to be called in a neighborhood, at all. It stood out on a little spur of the Palisades, delightfully nestled in a bit of woodland and lawns of its own.

"There!" he indicated it. "Pretty?"

Elsie looked, with a satisfying seriousness. The house was so new that the builder's self-advertis.e.m.e.nt still jostled the sign offering for sale: "this modern residence, all improvements."

"I love it," she p.r.o.nounced. "Those white cement houses are adorable; it looks as if it were made of cream-candy. What deep porches, like caves of white coral; and how deliciously the light gleams in those cunning, stained-gla.s.s windows! I suppose they are set up the stairs? It is a nice size, too; large enough to be quite luxurious, but not so large as to be appalling. How did you happen to notice it, dear?"

"I took this road for a short cut, one day. Look what a view you have up here. One must see twenty miles up and down the river, and over half New York. But it is open to inspection; let us go in."

"As if we were considering buying it," she fell in with the sport. "Yes, and we will be very critical indeed; find flaws and finally reject it.

Really, Anthony, it does not at all compare with our present residence."

"You'll do," he approved, drawing her up the broad, lazily-low steps.

It really was an enchanting house; a house that developed unexpected charms to the pair who wandered through its empty, echoing rooms and halls. It indulged in nooks, and inconsequential little balconies; it displayed a most inviting window-seat halfway up the stairs that could only have been designed for lovers.

"But none have been there, yet," Elsie observed, lingering on the stairs to contemplate this last allurement. "Just think, Anthony, that it is a mere debutante of a house with its ball-book all unfilled. No one has sat before its hearth, or nestled in its window-seat, or opened its door to let in love or give out charity. It is an Undine house whose soul has not yet entered its cool whiteness. Oh, I hope the people who buy it are both fair and good, and respect its innocence!"