A Man's Hearth Part 4

"The best of them," he corrected.

"Of course! The most best--why should anyone make more worst?"

They laughed together. But directly the restless unhappiness flowed back into his eyes.

"They do, though!" he exclaimed.

"Then they are wrong, all wrong," she said decidedly. "They should set themselves right the moment they find it out."

"But if they can't?" he urged, with a personal heat and protest. "Things aren't so simple as all that. Suppose they can't set one thing straight without knocking over a lot of others? You _cannot_ go cutting and slashing through like that!"

"Oh, yes; you can," she contradicted, sitting very upright, her gray eyes fired. "You must; anyone must. It is cowardly to let things, crooked things, grow and grow. And one could not knock down anything worth while that easily. Good things are strong."

He shook his head. But she had stirred him so that he sat silent for a while, then rather suddenly rose to take his leave.

"You never told me your name," he remarked, looking down at her. He noticed again how supple and deft her fingers were, and their capable swiftness at the work.

"No. Why?" she replied simply.

"I don't know," he accepted the rebuke. "I--beg your pardon."

"Oh, certainly. Holly is trying to shake hands before you go."

Of course he and the baby had become friends. He carefully yielded his forefinger to the clutching hands, but he did not smile as usual.

"Look here," he spoke out brusquely. "Just as an ill.u.s.tration that things are not as easily kept straight as you seem to think--I know a man who somehow got to following one woman around. I don't think he knows quite how. Of course, he admired her immensely, and liked her.

Well, I suppose he felt more than that! But he never even imagined making love to her, because she was married. You see, he was a fool. One day when he called, she told him that she was going to get a divorce from her husband. She has the right. And the man found she expected to marry him, afterward; she thought he had meant that all along. What could he do? What can he do?"

The baby gurgled merrily, dropping the forefinger and yawning. The girl laid down her work to tuck a coverlet about her charge.

"I do not know," she admitted, her voice low.

Adriance drew a quick breath.

"That isn't all of it. The husband is the man's friend. Why, they used to sleep together, eat together----! And he doesn't know. Don't you see, the man has to fail either the husband or wife? How can you straighten that?"

She looked up, to meet the unconscious self-betrayal of his defiant, unhappy eyes.

"I am very sorry for him," she answered gravely. And, after a moment.

"She must be very clever."

He started away from the suggestion with sharp resentment. Clever--that was his father's term for Lucille Masterson; and it was hateful to him.

He would not a.n.a.lyze why he felt that repugnance to hearing Lucille called clever. He refused to consider what that implied, what ugly depths of doubt were stirred in him to make him wince in anger and humiliation. Suddenly he bitterly regretted having told the story to this girl, even under the concealed ident.i.ty.

"No doubt," he made a coldly vague rejoinder. "I dare say the matter will work itself out well enough. It is getting late; I think I must go."

It was altogether too abrupt, and he knew it. But he could do no better.

He knew the girl's eyes followed him away, and he walked with careful ease and nonchalance.

Out of her sight, he walked more slowly. Already the autumn twilight was settling down like a delicate gray veil. At the foot of the Palisades, opposite, a familiar point of light sprang into view among the myriad lights there; a point that ran like fire through tow, up, across, around until the glittering words shone complete: "Adriance's Paper."

The name was reflected in the dark water. Down there, it swayed weakly and its legend was broken by the river's ripples. "You shine, up there, but I govern here," the Hudson flung its scorn back to the man-made arrogance. He was like that reflection, Tony Adriance thought, with a fancy caught from the girl's trick of imagery; he was the mere reflection of his father's successes, shifting, worthless, inseparable from the gold-colored reality above, dancing and broken on the current of a woman's will. He himself was--nothing. He winced under the self-applied lash. It was knotted with truth; he, personally, never had counted. Even Lucille never had said she loved him; she simply had taken his devotion for granted, and used it. Would she have promised herself to him if he had been a poor man? Would she ever have contemplated divorce from Masterson, with all his faults, if Tony Adriance had not brought himself and his gilded possibilities across her path? The questions were ugly, and sent the blood into his face. He stopped walking and stood by the stone wall edging the sidewalk, facing the river.

He always had resented being merely his father's heir, in a vague, una.n.a.lyzed way. Now resentment threatened to flame into rebellion.

Rebellion against what? His father, who left him absolute freedom from any restraint? Lucille, whom he was at perfect liberty never to see again, if he chose to deny her a.s.sumption? He was very completely trapped by circ.u.mstance, since the trap was open and yet he could not leave it.

The delicate dot on the _i_ of irony was that he had loved Lucille, yet he knew he must be miserable with her all their lives. He thought of her even now with a certain longing, yet he would always distrust her and detest himself. His fingers gripped the stone edge; he felt a pa.s.sionate envy of men who were strong enough to do insane, desperate things, to tear their own way ruthlessly through the clinging web of other people's ways. He fancied the girl in black to be such a person; if she considered herself right in any course, she would take it.

But after a while he turned away and began to walk home. He had to dress, for he was dining with the Mastersons. It had been insisted upon, to make amends for the night he had stayed away to dine with his father. Lucille was not yet ready for any audible whisper to suggest divorce to the world or her husband. Tony must come and go as usual for a few weeks more. She had chosen to forget his appeal, after quelling his mutiny. Mrs. Masterson was not a generous victor.

CHAPTER IV

THE WOMAN WHO GRASPED

The Mastersons' apartment had, like many such apartments, a charming little foyer. It was lighted by a jade-green lamp, swung in bronze chains delicately green from the tinting of time; and the notes of bronze and dull jade were carried through all the furnishings, through leather and tapestry and even a great, dragon-clasped Chinese vase. But those greenish lights were not always becoming to visitors. When Tony Adriance entered the foyer that evening they were so unbecoming to him that the maid privately decided he was ill. Her master not infrequently came home with that worn look about the eyes and mouth. She wondered if Mr. Adriance gambled.

None of the other guests had arrived. Indeed, it was not yet time. The clink of gla.s.s and bustle of servants in the dining-room alone told of the coming event in hospitality. Hospitality? Tony Adriance stood still, arrested in his movement toward the drawing-room; the sick distaste of all the last weeks finally culminated in paralysis before the prospect of the farce he was expected to play out, with his unconscious host as spectator.

"I--am not ready," he found himself temporizing with the maid. His glance fell upon a desk and prompted him. "I have forgotten an important letter; I will write it before I go in. Don't wait; I know my way."

She obeyed him. Of course he had nothing to write, but he fumbled for a sheet of paper and picked up a pen. He was awake at last to the enormity of his presence here as a guest; before he had glimpsed it, now he saw it, stripped naked.

He could not go on. There was no reason why the conviction should have come to him at this moment, but it did so. As he sat there, that knowledge rose slowly to full stature before his vision like an actual figure reared in the path he had been following. It was no longer a question of Lucille's desires or his own; he could not do this thing.

He was not accustomed to intricate windings of thought, or to self-a.n.a.lysis. He hardly understood, as yet, what was aroused in him, or why. But he knew that he must act; that his time of pa.s.sive drifting was ended. Once Lucille had reproached him with cowardice. To-day, the girl in the pavilion had innocently brought the charge again. And the girl was right; it was cowardly to let a wrong grow and grow. Masterson's friend in Masterson's house! Adriance dropped the pen his clenching fingers had bent, and stood up.

The maid had gone back to that centre of approaching activities, the kitchen. Alone, Adriance went down the corridor to the drawing-room.

Mrs. Masterson was alone there, moving some introduced chairs into less conspicuous situations. The alien chairs were covered in rose-color and marred the clouded-blue effect of the room. She pushed them about with a vicious force, as though she hated the inanimate offenders; her expression was sullen and fretful.

That expression altered too quickly, when she saw Adriance standing on the threshold. He caught the skilful change that transformed it into winning plaintiveness.

"You, Tony?" she greeted him, advancing to give him her hand. "I am so glad it was no one else. _You_ know how I must contrive and make the best of what little I have. How I loathe this cramped place, and bringing chairs from bed-chambers to have enough, and all pinching----!"

She glanced about her with a flare of contempt, her smooth scarlet lip lifting in a sneer.

Adriance slowly looked over the room, not very large, perhaps, yet scarcely cramped; made lovely by opalescent lamps and fragrant by the perfume of roses set in high, slender vases of rock-crystal. All one wall was smothered in the silken warmth of a Chinese rug, against whose blue was lifted the creamy whiteness of an ivory elephant quaintly carved and poised on its pedestal. Even to his eyes nothing here warranted discontent.

"I thought this very pretty," he dissented. "I thought Masterson had done things very well, here."

"Well enough, for a nook in a house; not for the house," she retorted.

"I hate living in apartments. I always have wanted stairs; wide, shining stairs down which I would pa.s.s to cross broad rooms!"

She drew a thirsty breath. In the gleaming gown which left uncovered as much of her beauty as an indulgent fashion allowed, her large light eyes avid, her yellow head thrown slightly forward as she looked up at the man, she was a vivid and unconscious embodiment of greed. Not the pitiful greed of necessity, but the greed which, having much, covets more. As if he shared her mind, Adriance knew that she pictured herself descending the stairs in his father's house gowned and jewelled as Mrs.

Tony Adriance could be and Lucille Masterson could not.