A Man's Hearth Part 3

"What do you mean?" she demanded, lifting her narrow, arched eyebrows.

"My _costume trottoir_, and apples----? Aren't you considerably confused, Tony?"

"Can't we at least face what we are doing?" he countered. "If we are able to do a thing, we ought to be able to look at it, surely. We can put through this thing, and our friends will think none the less of us; they are that kind. But they are not all the people on earth, you know.

What the maid who brushes your gown or the man who opens the door for me says of us downstairs may come nearer the general opinion. Perhaps we would better have considered that. For I am afraid the majority of the white man's world cannot be altogether wrong."

There was a quality in his voice that alarmed her. He had flung himself into a chair beside her desk, and sat nervously moving back and forth the trinkets nearest his hand. She stood quite still, studying him before committing herself by a reply. This was a Tony Adriance strange to her.

"It seems very cowardly, to me, to be afraid of what people will say,"

she slowly answered. "And I will not have you speak to me as if I were a wicked woman, Tony. You know that I am not. You know I have borne with Fred's neglect and extravagance much longer than other women would."

He flushed dark-red at the taunt of cowardice, but he spoke doggedly, tenacious of his purpose.

"You could not give Fred another chance? You remember, he and I were friends, once. He has played too much with the stock market. Well, I might get my father to help him there; we might fix it so that he won sometimes, instead of lost. You do not know how hard it is for me to come into Fred's house this way."

A flash of blended anger and fear crossed Mrs. Masterson's large, light-colored eyes.

"Is it?" she doubted, cuttingly. "You have been coming here for a whole year, Tony."

She had found the one retort he could not answer. Adriance opened his lips, then closed them with a grim recognition of defeat. Who would believe he had come here innocently? How could he tell this beautiful and sophisticated woman that he had been vaguely, romantically charmed by her without ever dreaming of any issue to the affair or of letting her suspect his mild sentimentality? How could he hope she would credit the tale, if he did tell her?

She had been watching his changing expression; herself paled by a very genuine dread. Now, suddenly she was beside him, her hands on his shoulders.

"Don't you love me any more, Tony? You come in here to-day and rage at me----! Have you taught me for months to need you and count on you for all the future, only to leave me, now? Oh, I believed _you_ were strong and true!"

A caress from her was so rare an event, so unfamiliar a concession, that her mere nearness fired Adriance. Her fragrant face was close to his; he looked into her eyes, like jewels under water, suffused by her terror of losing him.

His kiss was her victory. Instantly she was away from him; half across the room and sending furtive glances toward the curtained doorways, even toward the windows five stories above the street. The guilt implied in the action made it to Adriance as if a hand had struck the kiss from his lips.

"We must be careful," she cautioned. "Suppose someone were coming in?

You didn't mean all that, Tony? You love me as much as ever?"

Adriance moved toward her.

"I won't answer that in Masterson's house," he said, his voice shaken.

"Lucille, you have got to do now what I asked you to do weeks ago: you must leave here at once and marry me as soon as it can be done. Since we have begun this thing, we must carry it through as decently as possible.

And it is not decent for you to stay here or for me to come here. If you come with me now, to-day, I will put you with someone who can act as chaperon until the divorce is obtained; one of my aunts, perhaps. If you do this, and help me to keep what honestly is left, I give you my word that I never will fail you as long as I live, come what may."

She drew back from his vehemence. a.s.sured of herself and him, now, she permitted a frown to tangle her fair brow in half-amused rebuke.

"My dear boy, what a dramatic tirade! Of course I will come to you the first moment possible--but, to-day? And just now you were deprecating gossip! You must let me arrange this affair. I am not ready to leave Fred, yet. Do you not understand? I must wait until he makes another one of his scenes; I must have a fresh reason for going, not a past one already tacitly overlooked."

"You will not come?"

She turned from his darkened face to the mirror.

"You really are very selfish, Tony. Pray think a little of me instead of yourself. But I will try to do as you wish; next month, perhaps. I could go to Florida for the winter."

Adriance sat down again beside the desk and took a cigarette from a small lacquered tray that stood there. He was beaten, but he was not submissive. He bent his head to the yoke with a bitter, sick reluctance.

Yet he understood that it was too late to draw out. Lucille loved him; whether intentionally or not, he had won her. No, he must finish what he had begun.

The cigarette was perfumed, and nauseated him. He dropped it into an ash-receiver, but it had given him a moment to steady himself. After all, Masterson did neglect his wife. If he could not keep his own, why should Tony Adriance turn altruist and try to do it for him? At least, Lucille might be happy.

Mrs. Masterson had touched her hat into place, surveying her vivid reflection. She was wise enough to take her triumph casually.

"Shall we go?" she questioned. "Nan Madison hates late arrivals, you know. Do make your man throw away that cravat you are wearing, Tony.

Gray is not your color. It makes you look too pale; too much----"

"Like Maitre Raoul Galvez?" he dryly supplied, rising.

"Who was he?"

"A man who raised the Devil. I am quite ready if you wish to go."

CHAPTER III

THE GIRL OUTSIDE

Tony Adriance slipped into the habit of pausing for a few words with the girl in black whenever circ.u.mstances set them opposite each other. And that was quite often, since his home was so near the pavilion she had adopted as her place of repose. He rather avoided his friends, during the days following his futile rebellion against Lucille Masterson's will, yet he was lonely and eager to escape thought. He could talk to the girl, he admitted to himself, because she did not know him.

They met with a casual frankness, the girl and he, like two men who find each other congenial, yet whose lives lie far apart. Their brief conversations were intimate without being inquisitively personal. She had a trick of saying things that lingered in the memory; at least, in his memory. Not that she was especially brilliant; her charm was her earnestness, at once vivid and tranquil, and the odd glamor of enchantment she threw over plain commonsense, making it no longer plain, but alluring as folly.

But she continued to wear the shabby little boots, with their optimistic bravery of blacking. They really were respectable boots, aging, not aged. The fault lay with Adriance, not them; he was too much accustomed to women "whose sandals delighted his eyes." If her feet had been less childishly small, they might have preoccupied him less. As it was, they preoccupied him more and more.

There is no accepted way of offering a pair of shoes to a feminine acquaintance. Nevertheless, in the third week of his friendship with the girl, Adriance bought a pair of pumps for her. He had seen them in a gla.s.s case set out before a shop and stopped to gaze, astonished. They were so unmistakably hers; the size, the rounded lines, the very arch and tilt were right! They were of shining black, with Spanish heels and glinting buckles.

He took them home with him, but of course he dared not give them to her.

He had an idea that he might essay the venture on the last occasion of their meeting; if she punished him with banishment, then, it would not matter. For he meant to leave New York when Lucille went to Florida. He would spend the necessary interval between the divorce and his marriage, in Canada, alone.

Meanwhile, there was the girl.

It was on the last day of October that he found her knitting instead of embroidering; a web of gay scarlet across her knees.

"A new suit for Holly's big Teddybear," she explained, as he sat down opposite to her. "Christmas is coming, you know. I like to have all ready in advance. Don't you think the color should become a brown-plush bear?"

"It is not depressing."

"It is the color of holly. And depression is not a sensation to cultivate, is it?" She paused to gaze across the river, already shadowed by approaching evening. "I believe in fighting it off with both hands; driving a spear right through the ugly thing and holding it up like Sir Sintram with that wriggly monster in the old picture."

"You would be a good one to be in trouble with," he said abruptly.

She disentangled his meaning from the extremely vague speech, and nodded serious a.s.sent.

"Yes, perhaps. I'm used to making the most of things."