A Man's Hearth Part 5

He was not aware of the change in his own face until he saw its reflection in the sudden alarm and question clouding hers. He answered her expression, then, compelling his voice to hold its low evenness of speech with the inborn distaste of well-bred modern man for betrayed emotion.

"That is it," he interpreted. "That is why you would marry me and leave Masterson. You want more than he can give you. If he had as much to give as I have, it would not matter what he did. You would bear with him.

Perhaps you have been bearing with me."

"Tony!" she stammered.

"It is quite true. I have been a solemn fool. I have been nerving myself to lay down my self-respect without flinching, because I believed that I had led you to count upon me; and all the while you were counting upon what I owned."

She gathered her forces together after the surprise.

"Rather severe, Tony, because I dislike expensive tenement life!" she commented, with careful irony. Turning aside, she laid her lace scarf across a table, gaining a respite from his gaze. "Have I ever pretended not to care for beautiful, luxurious things? And does that argue that I care for nothing else? I think you should apologize--and pay more heed to your digestion."

He paused an instant, steadying himself. As usual, she had contrived to make him feel in the wrong and ashamed.

"I do apologize," he said, less certainly. "I did not come in here to say all that, Lucille. But I did come to say what reaches the same end.

We cannot finish this thing we have begun. We could not stand it. Think whatever you may of me as a coward, I am not going on."

"Indeed, I think you have gone far enough," she calmly returned.

"Suppose we sit down and be civilized. Will you smoke before dinner?"

He shook his head, baffled in spite of himself by her elusiveness, but also angered to resolution. And he knew that he had seen her truly a moment since; the loveliness that had glamoured his sight for a year could not hide from memory that glimpse of her mind.

"I am not staying to dinner, thanks," he refused. "And I am not playing.

Our matter looked bad enough as it was, but you showed me a worse thing, just now. It was bad enough to take my friend's wife for love; I can't and won't take her by means of my father's money."

She wheeled about, swiftly and hotly aflame, and they stared at each other as strangers.

"You have forgotten that we are engaged," she said stingingly. "Or doesn't your conscience heed a broken word?"

"Perhaps it is heeding the tactfulness of being engaged to one man while you are married to another," he struck back, goaded to a brutality foreign to his nature.

The faint chime of touching gla.s.ses checked them on the brink of a breach that would have made reconciliation impossible. Mrs. Masterson dropped into a chair, s.n.a.t.c.hing up a fan to shade her flushed face.

Adriance stood stiffly, where he was, wisely making no attempt at artificial nonchalance. The servant who entered saw only composure in his immobility.

Mrs. Masterson eagerly lifted the offered c.o.c.ktail to her lips, as if anger had parched them. Adriance took a gla.s.s from the tray presented to him, but at once set it aside upon the table; now that he realized, he felt that the hospitality of this house was not for him. But the brief interlude helped both of them.

When the servant had gone, Adriance spoke with restored calmness.

"You see, even now the situation has warped us all awry. If it were not so, I should like to buy things for you, I suppose. I can imagine----"

He broke the sentence; quite suddenly he had remembered the little buckled shoes bought for the girl in the pavilion. He had looked interestedly at other things in the shop, while he waited for his parcel. It would have given him delight to purchase certain elaborate stockings and absurd lace-frilled handkerchiefs.

"I can imagine that I should," he finished lamely. "Lucille, you will come to agree with me, I hope. But even if you do not, I cannot go on."

She rose and came up to him with a swift movement that brought both her hands against his shoulders before he grasped her intention. Her warm face was directly beneath his own.

"Is there someone else, Tony?" she demanded. "Some girl? Of course it would be a young girl who inspired all this; 'pure as water'--and as tasteless! Is that it?"

She might have struck him with less effect. Tony Adriance went absolutely numb with disgusted wrath. What preposterous thing did she imply? The shining gray eyes of the girl in the pavilion looked at him across the alert, probing gaze of Lucille Masterson; looked at him with beautiful candor, with indignation. He felt outraged, as if the young girl herself had been made present in this nasty scene. And without cause! He had no thought of loving that sober little figure; he was sick of love.

"I am sorry you cannot credit me with one disinterested motive," he said coldly. "As it happens, you are wrong. There is no one except you. I am going away because you are neither unmarried nor a widow, since you force me to repeat all this. If you were either----"

"You would stay?" she whispered.

He looked down at her, and as always before her magic his strength grew weak. He lifted her hands from his shoulders, before replying.

"Yes," he conceded, his voice changed. "But it is over, Lucille. Tell Masterson I have gone abroad; to stay."

As he moved toward the door, Mrs. Masterson turned to the table and caught up his untouched gla.s.s. Fear and chagrin were swept from her face; it still glowed from her late rage, but her eyes were lighted with confidence and ironic relief.

"To your safe voyage and pleasant return!" she exclaimed lightly, facing him across the room. "For you will come back, Tony. The spasm will pa.s.s; and leave you lonely. I can wait, then. Good-night."

She laughed outright at the consternation in his glance, as he paused.

But he turned and went out, leaving her leaning across the arm of one of the discordant rose-colored chairs, watching him.

Back in the foyer, Adriance stopped to recover a conventional composure of bearing before going out. He recalled that he must pa.s.s inspection by the elevator boy and footman; must meet their wonder, no less obvious because dumb, at his departure before the dinner.

The heavy blankness of his waiting was broken by the gayest sound in the world. The gurgling laughter of a happy child rippled through the silence like a brook, cascading down in a cadence of chuckles. As if to confirm the recognition to which Adriance started, a girl's clear laugh joined the baby merriment. Opposite him, light showed in a thin line through a curtained doorway. Without the slightest remembrance of proprieties or conventions, he sprang that way and swung the door open.

He was on the threshold of a nursery; a room pink as the inside of a rosebud, gay with all the adorable paraphernalia babyhood demands, fragrant with violet-powder and warm as a nest. At the foot of a shining little bed, clutching the bra.s.s rail for support while executing a stamping dance, was the lord of the domain; his silk-fine, frankly red hair rumpled into glinting ringlets about his moist, rosy face, his blue eyes crinkled shut by mirth. The girl knelt opposite, steadying the chubby figure and serenely indifferent to the small, mischievous fingers that had loosened her dark hair from its braids. Without her hat, she was younger, even more wholesome and good than he had thought. She looked as fresh and candid as the damp, open-lipped kisses the baby lavished upon her.

Perhaps the intruder moved, perhaps she felt his gaze, for as he watched the girl broke up the picture. She rose abruptly, turned, and saw him standing there.

At first her startled face told only of surprise; indeed his mere presence there gave her no reason to feel more. But in his dismay and bewilderment and complete obsession Tony Adriance betrayed himself.

"I didn't know," he stammered, grasping blindly at justification and apology. "I didn't know who Holly was--or that you lived here. I am sorry; I should not have spoken----"

He stopped short. He had forgotten the fiction of a third person with which he had masked his confidence in the park; forgotten that the girl knew neither his name nor his purpose in this house. Quite without necessity he had enlightened her.

For the girl was swift of perception. Perhaps his expression alone would have told her the truth, if he had been silent. Mechanically she had put one arm around the baby, now she drew it closer, as if in protection.

Her rain-gray eyes grieved, reproached, rebuked him. Possessed of Lucille Masterson's plans, holding her son, she faced him in judgment.

Of course he had known Lucille had a child, somewhat as he knew his father owned the factory behind the electric sign. He never had seen either of them, except distantly; they meant nothing actual to him. But now, there seemed nothing in the world so important. The girl had not spoken, yet she had abruptly brought him face to face with new things.

"You know, I would have taken him, too," he tried to answer all she left unsaid, hating himself for the unsteady humility he could not keep from his voice. "I always meant to. I meant to do everything for the boy. I could--I am Anthony Adriance."

She spoke, then, her smooth voice all roughened.

"You can buy him everything? You cannot buy him his father. And nothing will make up for that."

"But----"

She struck down the weak protest.

"I _know_. I have a good father. And Holly," the infinite compa.s.sion of her glance embraced the baby, "he has not even a real mother to do her half. It is not right; you cannot make it right."

"But I have! I am going----!"